Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police's arsenal

The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain's cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK's first fixed facial recognition cameras. Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Alerts can lead to arrests.