Foodstuffs North Island claims facial recognition success

A six-month trial of facial recognition technology across New World and PAK’nSAVE stores has lead to improved safety and a decrease in retail crime, says Foodstuff North Island (FSNI).

In February, the group started trialling the tech at 25 stores, to determine if it could help stores identify repeat offenders and enhance the safety of staff and customers. The facial recognition technology works by matching the faces of people who enter a store against that store’s record of past offenders and accomplices. The system has proved controversial, however, after profiling errors that include a women being wrongly identified as an offender in a Rotorua supermarket earlier this year. The Privacy Commissioner announced an inquiry into FSNI's trial of this facial recognition (FR) technology in April. 

According to early results from the trial’s independent evaluator, "The use of FR avoided an estimated 130 serious incidents such as assault and verbal abuse across the 25 trial stores when compared to previous serious incident data. FR also appears to have deterred repeat offenders, who have subsequently reduced their visits to the stores. There has also been an 8% quarterly decrease in incidents of retail crime across all FSNI stores, and a 42% quarterly fall in serious incidents."

FSNI Chief Executive Chris Quin said this showed the FR trial was effective at reducing harm and improving safety but no decisions on its future use will be made until after the co-op receives the final results from the independent evaluator.

“The safety and wellbeing of our team members and customers is our top priority so avoiding an estimated 130 incidents of our people or customers being attacked or abused is a significant achievement,” said Quin.

During the six-month trial there were 1,747 alerts across the 25 trial stores. For approximately one quarter of all incidents, store teams simply observed the identified match, for another quarter of incidents they took no action at all. In just under half of cases the repeat offender was asked to leave.

Quin said that all too often, it was the same people who kept turning up at a store, despite being trespassed, causing more harm and committing more crime.

“We’ve been really concerned about the growing trend of our staff or customers being put in harm’s way. We’ll wait for the final report, but while the numbers are still far too high, it seems like our well-publicised FR trial might have made a real difference.”

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