The Guardian reported that Western Australia police used facial recognition to scan the faces of more than one million people in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology. According to the report, the trial resulted in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. The summary describes the technology only as real-time and gives no other technical details about it.
The Guardian's summary says the trial involved deployments of surveillance vans over five months. Those deployments are reported to have led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders. The summary does not state how many of those engagements were connected to the 122 arrests, so the two figures cannot be linked from the summary alone.
The same report said the deployments produced nine false alerts. The summary uses the terms false alerts and incorrect alerts for that figure, and it does not describe what happened after any alert was raised or whether anyone was affected by one.
The article is credited to Ima Caldwell and Penry Buckley. The summary is cut off before it reaches the police account, which it introduces with the words WA police said. As a result, the police response and any details of how the system was run or overseen are not available from the summary.
The summary also does not give accuracy rates for the technology, the sites where the vans operated, or the databases against which faces were compared. Readers seeking those points can turn to The Guardian's full report on the trial, of which this summary is only a portion.