Western Australia Police Force says its five-month facial recognition trial recorded 292 alerts and 122 arrests, but its summary does not specify how many arrests followed directly from alerts.
The operation ran from June 22 to Saturday, Oct. 31, with 100 deployments across 43 metropolitan and regional locations. Police reported 1,380,882 face scans and nine incorrect alerts. The force gave the incorrect alerts as 0.00065% of scans; calculated from its totals, they amounted to about 3.1% of all alerts.
Cameras on or near marked police vehicles compared faces in public spaces against lawfully held police images. Officers reviewed alerts, which alone did not provide grounds for an arrest or other police powers. WA Police said faces that did not generate an alert were pixelated and automatically deleted. Its summary did not break down alerts or errors by demographic group.
Police also reported 146 engagements with registered sex offenders and said 10 people were identified for welfare checks.
The Office of the Information Commissioner WA (OIC WA) said it was not invited to formal consultation or the trial’s design. It said it was monitoring the trial and requesting information, adding: “Even where this information is only held for a very short time, it is still a collection.”
A separate national survey measured broader privacy concerns, not views on this trial. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) found that 45% of 1,504 adults surveyed in March 2026 named facial recognition among their biggest privacy risks, compared with 27% in 2023.
WA Police will conduct an internal evaluation covering system performance, operational effectiveness, community impact, governance and compliance. Police have not announced when the evaluation will be published or when a decision on future use will be made.
