Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well.
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
I don't personally support this surveillance, but that isn't what the articles says. It says they will be "scanning for suspects from above." And later quotes the Met making reference to 'intelligence'. So conceivably they could have information about the plans of specific individuals at this event.
It doesn't matter what the article says. There is no penalty for lying and no incentive to be honest. The media exists to broadcast their lies at scale.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
It's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.
No, nothing to do with Reform. Organised by Tommy Robinson. The guy Reform think is such a nutcase that they turned down a huge donation from Elon Musk because Elon made it conditional on letting Robinson join Reform.
Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
To Reforms credit while I do think they started off as a bit of a looney party that relied on theatrics they managed to evolve into a more mature party ever since Zia Yusuf joined and you see how the tone of Nigel Farage has already become more serious. To some that will look like they became "Conservatives 2.0" but I don't think we have another real conservative party left anyway.
No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.
I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.
However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
There has been no violence at any of the previous marches iirc. I think people assume there must have been because Starmer and co are foaming for violence...but there weren't.
Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.
Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.
Yes, the fact that large number of criminal activities have effectively been decriminalized would tend to beg the question why this is being deployed at a political protest.
The implication of police state is that they care about crime, but they do not care about crime. Anyone can turn up in Britain, claim asylum and will be sent to a hotel closed down for their comfort. Many visas were denied for speakers at this protest.
It is a politician state, not a police state. Facial recognition is being deployed against political opponents, not criminals.
Well, I guess they'll have to raise the custody time limits to something more reasonable then, like a year or so. I mean, as long as you get a trial eventually, this is fine, right?
I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
Omniscient government surveillance in practice will be of far more use for harassment and suppressing political dissent than it ever will be used for the public good.
Even if the people who are putting all of this surveillance in place genuinely do want to do good, the surveillance will still be in place if someone less scrupulous gains power
Did that risk materialise? I suppose it would be only the same as credit cards. With a valid warrant authorities can gain access to information. But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament. I'm more concerned about ensuring the legal powers are checked and balanced, and stay that way.
> But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.
Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!
And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.
There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.
Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.
What do you mean? Pulling a few camera feeds to track down or identify a theft occurring at a known location at a roughly known time is a few minute's work. It's worth the value of the bike let alone the value of prosecuting a criminal.
In my experience they will pull the video of the bike literally being stolen, but it simply shows someone in a hoodie and mask at night cutting the lock and walking off. There's nothing further you can do with this video.
What you need is something like being able to search all of the cameras from a wide area which contain a bike and x color hoodie so you can follow the person back to some other location that identifies them further. This is the part that's missing in most cities. It could be done manually, and it would be if it was a very serious crime like terrorism, but for normal theft it isn't worth the time. The tech does exist now though.
> David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it.
Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?
This news from the UK is concerning and the UK is slowly turning into a dystopia but still your reasoning is flawed.
The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.
So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.
Illusion of Control. Oct 7th, 9/11, Snowden, Epstein are all examples of illusion being broken. The reactions are to restore illusion. But its getting harder and harder as things changes faster than reactions can happen. So we get Moises Naims prediction on the End of Power - power is easier to get, harder to use, easy to loose.
Bugger Oyster and bugger CCTV! How well protected do you think all those video doorbells are?
Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.
You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.
I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.
Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.
Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.
Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months.
A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
so she was 16 when she "disappeared" (how, where, sleeping in the streets?) and the camera can link a 16 y.o. face to a 36 y.o. one after probably rough years?
This is a bit of an oversell on their part. The offenses include:
> A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
> 37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions
> Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.
> Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.
> Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.
These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.
The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.
I'm not sure what your argument is since the police enforce the law as it is, not as it should be. "Without fear or favour."
> The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement.
The bureaucratic solution to situations like the Arena bombing is to remove human judgment and replace it with 4k video analytics. The technology already exists. I don't like it either but if there is ever a way to remove decision making power from a person by means of technology or process, the bureaucracy will gleefully use it.
That's a very poor read. Most of these look like breaches of previous conviction release terms. Failure to appear isn't a non-issue. It's a bail skip to dodge a conviction.
I'll agree they're not fresh murders, but if you don't enforce the terms of a release on licence, it makes it a joke, and more importantly puts the public at risk.
You think we should just let sex offenders roam the streets without apprehending them? Or it's only OK if you spent a lot of money to apprehend them, rather than picking people from a camera feed?
The minimum standard for a "sex offence" in the UK seems to include [0] "Sharing or threatening to share intimate photograph or film" and "Sending etc photograph or film of genitals". Which (1) don't do either of those things. Ew. and (2) In a practical sense they can be pretty harmless. Maybe a fine or a strongly worded letter would be appropriate in more serious cases.
So there isn't any problem, in the abstract, with some sex offenders wandering the streets.
> Live facial recognition will scan the faces of those heading to the “Unite the Kingdom, Unite the West” rally in the borough of Camden, marking the first time the technology has been authorized for use at a protest in the UK. The rally was organized by activist Tommy Robinson who says the rally is for “national unity, free speech and Christian values.”
Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:
> Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.
The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.
Yes. It's alright to do it when I don't like the person. Should a person I don't like really have rights, or privacy? Also, I'm sure that the people who don't like him like me, right?
> Should a person I don't like really have rights, or privacy?
For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)
That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.
People need to be allowed to speak in public without having their identities recorded by the police. Also, if you want to follow somebody around who has "violent convictions," you don't have to release them, you can parole them ("released on license" I think I want to say?)
There's a reason you choose to do this during a political protest.
Also, you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts for some reason? Do you think that they are justified because he, and the people who join him, will be publicly avoiding taxes and bookies?
edit: It's also important to note that in the 15th year of future Reform rule, when a "reformed" Tommy Robinson is appointed Home Secretary, he will entirely support drones doing facial recognition during protests. How else are you supposed to catch the anti-Semites?
> People need to be allowed to speak in public without having their identities recorded by the police
Sure. But this isn't an absolute right. To be trivial, you don't have the right to do fraud in public without being recorded by the police.
I'm saying for a convicted violent criminal, particularly one with a history of inciting violence, I think there is a place where a reasonable line could exist.
This is absolutely irrelevant. I don't fucking care whatever the police thinks a protest, any protest should turn into, because I don't want the police to have this power, because it will be abused.
Unfortunately the outcome of massive division. People are gullible enough to go along with it while it's not being used against "their people" until it ends up being too late.
> The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot
Robinson has organised 4 London rallies in recent years and this is the second Unite The Kingdom rally. So what makes you think this will be the one which turns violent?
It's basically families listening to speakers on a stage.
Regarding the broader picture, it’s interesting that despite the ineffectiveness of even major protests over the past decades—Iraq being the prime example—governments are introducing more obstacles to disincentivise them. From the perspective of government, why not simply ignore such events, use existing (extensive) laws which cover them? It’s like states are unconsciously preparing for the large-scale disruption which may yet come to pass.
You think police should ignore situations in which violence and destruction of property are highly likely?
Why? How does that benefit society?
At what point do you allow intervention? After they've destroyed £x,000 of property? After people are assaulted? How are you proposing police get deployed safely in those circumstances with 10s of thousands of protesters/rioters in the streets?
Don't you think maintaining law& order is a necessary activity of the state in a democracy?
You can't seriously think we should stand back and give over or streets to whoever can be most violent?
It's crazy how little hardware is required to do facial recognition, OCR and CLIP. Immich on my little raspberry pi swiftly chewed through 100k pictures over night.
I'm staunchly pro-Palestinian, despise Tommy Robinson and still think this is not a good thing. The UK has been draconian with its anti-free speech and surveillance. Even if you hate what this guy stands for (I do), it's only a matter of time before these techniques are used against causes you do stand for.
Somehow I don't think Tommy Robinson would take such an approach to say the classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization by the UK government though.
Surely it's not necessarily what he stands for but the violent way he does it?
Palestine Action acted as terrorists, attacking national defence infrastructure, attacking police with hammers, and called for genocide of Israelis.
You can protest in support of Palestinians without being violent, and without supporting specific proscribed groups; the state asserting it's monopoly on violence is normal. With democracy and rule of law - both strong in the UK - that's not something that will bother protestors.
Zionism is distributed and fighting against it must be as well. That’s not “terrorism”.
Regardless, like I said I don’t support crackdowns on freedom of speech or state surveillance. Even against those I consider my enemies. It will be used against people I agree with soon enough.
stavros | 7 hours ago
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
hactually | 7 hours ago
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
philipallstar | 7 hours ago
4ndrewl | 5 hours ago
spwa4 | 4 hours ago
asib | 4 hours ago
baal80spam | 7 hours ago
rolph | 7 hours ago
1shooner | 7 hours ago
stavros | 7 hours ago
futter9 | 7 hours ago
suburban_strike | 6 hours ago
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
conradludgate | 6 hours ago
stavros | 6 hours ago
NooneAtAll3 | 6 hours ago
graemep | 6 hours ago
Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | 6 hours ago
KaiserPro | 6 hours ago
No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.
I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.
However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
skippyboxedhero | 4 hours ago
Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.
Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.
pbhjpbhj | 2 hours ago
Clearly your sentiments are with the violent fascists. Why?
adi_kurian | an hour ago
https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
onetokeoverthe | 7 hours ago
phyzix5761 | 7 hours ago
Joker_vD | 6 hours ago
xeonmc | an hour ago
Leonard_of_Q | 6 hours ago
skippyboxedhero | 4 hours ago
The implication of police state is that they care about crime, but they do not care about crime. Anyone can turn up in Britain, claim asylum and will be sent to a hotel closed down for their comfort. Many visas were denied for speakers at this protest.
It is a politician state, not a police state. Facial recognition is being deployed against political opponents, not criminals.
KaiserPro | 5 hours ago
I mean its not. Plus with the court backlogs rising, the chances of you getting convicted are rapidly diminishing
Joker_vD | 5 hours ago
Well, I guess they'll have to raise the custody time limits to something more reasonable then, like a year or so. I mean, as long as you get a trial eventually, this is fine, right?
fidotron | 6 hours ago
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
dgellow | 6 hours ago
unethical_ban | 6 hours ago
bluefirebrand | 5 hours ago
Even if the people who are putting all of this surveillance in place genuinely do want to do good, the surveillance will still be in place if someone less scrupulous gains power
krisbolton | 6 hours ago
like_any_other | 6 hours ago
> But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.
Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!
And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/german...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-administration-argues-it-ca...
jolmg | 5 hours ago
The cards seem to accept cash
Gigachad | 5 hours ago
Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.
andrepd | 4 hours ago
Gigachad | 4 hours ago
What you need is something like being able to search all of the cameras from a wide area which contain a bike and x color hoodie so you can follow the person back to some other location that identifies them further. This is the part that's missing in most cities. It could be done manually, and it would be if it was a very serious crime like terrorism, but for normal theft it isn't worth the time. The tech does exist now though.
monksy | 4 hours ago
Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?
CTDOCodebases | 4 hours ago
The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.
So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.
greenavocado | 3 hours ago
*has already turned into a dystopian hell hole FTFY
At least China has more good weather
pbhjpbhj | 2 hours ago
deletedie | 2 hours ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/11/met-police-mak...
hgs6 | 4 hours ago
gerdesj | 4 hours ago
Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.
You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.
I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.
Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.
Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.
drekipus | an hour ago
krona | 6 hours ago
https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
croisillon | 6 hours ago
nomel | 5 hours ago
sverhagen | 5 hours ago
novok | 4 hours ago
suburban_strike | 6 hours ago
> A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
> 37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions
> Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.
> Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.
> Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.
These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.
The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.
krona | 5 hours ago
> The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement.
The bureaucratic solution to situations like the Arena bombing is to remove human judgment and replace it with 4k video analytics. The technology already exists. I don't like it either but if there is ever a way to remove decision making power from a person by means of technology or process, the bureaucracy will gleefully use it.
oliwarner | 5 hours ago
That's a very poor read. Most of these look like breaches of previous conviction release terms. Failure to appear isn't a non-issue. It's a bail skip to dodge a conviction.
I'll agree they're not fresh murders, but if you don't enforce the terms of a release on licence, it makes it a joke, and more importantly puts the public at risk.
basisword | 4 hours ago
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
>> These are all pretty low-hanging fruit.
>> This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans.
You listed voyeurism and RAPE. I'll take one less rapist on the streets thank you very much.
malfist | 4 hours ago
pbhjpbhj | 2 hours ago
malfist | 2 hours ago
roenxi | 2 hours ago
So there isn't any problem, in the abstract, with some sex offenders wandering the streets.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
cjs_ac | 6 hours ago
Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:
> Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.
The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
pessimizer | 5 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 5 hours ago
For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)
That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.
pessimizer | 5 hours ago
There's a reason you choose to do this during a political protest.
Also, you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts for some reason? Do you think that they are justified because he, and the people who join him, will be publicly avoiding taxes and bookies?
edit: It's also important to note that in the 15th year of future Reform rule, when a "reformed" Tommy Robinson is appointed Home Secretary, he will entirely support drones doing facial recognition during protests. How else are you supposed to catch the anti-Semites?
JumpCrisscross | 5 hours ago
Sure. But this isn't an absolute right. To be trivial, you don't have the right to do fraud in public without being recorded by the police.
I'm saying for a convicted violent criminal, particularly one with a history of inciting violence, I think there is a place where a reasonable line could exist.
> you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts
Where did I do this?
elzbardico | 5 hours ago
aliasxneo | 3 hours ago
krona | 5 hours ago
Robinson has organised 4 London rallies in recent years and this is the second Unite The Kingdom rally. So what makes you think this will be the one which turns violent?
It's basically families listening to speakers on a stage.
bcraven | 3 hours ago
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said officers had "policed without fear or favour", knowing it would be challenging.
"There is no doubt that many came to exercise their lawful right to protest, but there were many who came intent on violence."
Assistant Commissioner Twist said officers had suffered broken teeth, concussion, a prolapsed disc, a head injury and a possible broken nose.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwydezxl0xlo
deletedie | an hour ago
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/13/unite-the-ki...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/23/police-clash...
Cassell | 4 hours ago
pbhjpbhj | 2 hours ago
Why? How does that benefit society?
At what point do you allow intervention? After they've destroyed £x,000 of property? After people are assaulted? How are you proposing police get deployed safely in those circumstances with 10s of thousands of protesters/rioters in the streets?
Don't you think maintaining law& order is a necessary activity of the state in a democracy?
You can't seriously think we should stand back and give over or streets to whoever can be most violent?
nuyarusskii | 14 minutes ago
Because then the "Russian disinformation" about UK not being precisely a "democracy" suddenly starts looking true?
If you have no protests, it means that the public is ok with what the government is doing. In a democracy (whatever one understands by it) that is.
sureglymop | 3 hours ago
yamillove | 3 hours ago
lorecore | 3 hours ago
Somehow I don't think Tommy Robinson would take such an approach to say the classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization by the UK government though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action#Proscription_...
pbhjpbhj | 2 hours ago
Palestine Action acted as terrorists, attacking national defence infrastructure, attacking police with hammers, and called for genocide of Israelis.
You can protest in support of Palestinians without being violent, and without supporting specific proscribed groups; the state asserting it's monopoly on violence is normal. With democracy and rule of law - both strong in the UK - that's not something that will bother protestors.
lorecore | 52 minutes ago
Regardless, like I said I don’t support crackdowns on freedom of speech or state surveillance. Even against those I consider my enemies. It will be used against people I agree with soon enough.
nailer | 2 hours ago
xeonmc | an hour ago