Co-Op alone is seeing a 1,000 incidents of shoplifting a day at the minute[1]. I'm wary of governments overstepping the mark and using this stuff for ill, but I'm leaning on the side of this being a legitimate use case. Of course, we also need solutions to address the societal reasons why people are turning to shoplifting and organised crime in the first place.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/21/co-op-boss-urges-police-to-take-shoplifting-more-seriously-after-33m-cost" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/21/co-op-boss-u...</a>
There is an evil doppelgänger problem given how bad the recognition is - or how seemingly unrelated people can look like one another. Good luck arguing that the database is wrong.<p>And of course all of those problems are intensified for minorities or other out groups.
<a href="https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/rcmp-crack-fraudulent-passport-scheme-1.1823734" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/rcmp-crack-fraudulent-passport-sch...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Michael_Wiwchar" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Michael_Wiwchar</a><p>Slightly different case in nature but analyzing all the passport photos for duplicates is a no brainer move and led to at least one arrest and extradition in Canada. They allegedly paid drug addicts to file false applications in their names with different photos.
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I'd imagine that a significant chunk of shoplifters are teenagers, and given the 10 year lifetime of passports, their passport photos probably bear little resemblance to what they look like now.<p>I'd also imagine that another significant chunk of shoplifters are people who are struggling to get by financially, and if they're struggling to pay for food, they're not likely to be jetting off abroad on holiday and so unlikely to have paid £82 for a passport they don't need.
To be fair britain does have a crime problem and a money problem. Since it cant finance the police it could leverage the existing government owned database of people’s pictures to catch criminals faster. Should look into driving license photos as well.