British police are testing an AI system to track “suspicious” journeys

AI-powered surveillance is shifting from hunting for suspects to mapping everyday life, changing everyday mobility into a stream of behavioural data.

Police forces across the UK are experimenting with artificial intelligence that can automatically monitor and categorize the movements of motorists by using the country’s extensive license plate recognition system.

Internal documents seen by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph show that three of the nine regional organized crime units in England and Wales are testing a program developed by Faculty AI. This program is designed to learn from vehicle movement data and identify journeys that algorithms classify as “suspicious”.

For years, the Automatic License Plate Recognition (ANPR) system has recorded more than 100 million vehicle registrations daily, mostly to check whether a particular license plate has appeared in a specific area.

The new initiative fundamentally changes this logic. Instead of checking individual license plates, the software is trained to track entire routes and search for patterns of behaviour similar to those of criminal networks known for so-called “county lines” drug trafficking.

The project, named Operation Ignition, represents a change in scope and ambition.

Unlike conventional warning systems where officials manually mark “vehicles of interest”, the machine learning model learns from past data and creates its own list of potential targets.

Official documents acknowledge that this process could affect “millions of [vehicle registration numbers]” and that the information obtained could influence future decisions on the ethical and operational use of such technologies.

What began as a Home Office-funded trial in the northwest – encompassing Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire and North Wales – has now expanded to three regional organized crime units.

The authorities describe this as a technical experiment, but the documents suggest long-term plans for a nationwide rollout.

Civil rights organizations warn that such systems rarely remain confined to their original purpose.

Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch said: “The UK’s ANPR network is already one of the world’s largest surveillance networks, tracking the journeys of millions of innocent people every day. Using AI to analyse the millions of license plates it captures will only make this surveillance network more invasive. Monitoring and analysing so many journeys infringes on everyone’s privacy and has the potential to allow the police to analyse, with a single click, how we all move around the country.”

He added that while combating organized drug routes is a legitimate goal, “there is a real risk of misuse – ANPR was introduced as an anti-terrorism measure and is now being used to enforce traffic laws. The question is not whether the police should try to stop gangs, but how this next generation of license plate recognition could be used in the future.”

The search and profiling app was developed by Faculty AI, a British technology company with close ties to government projects.

The company, which worked with Dominic Cummings during the Vote Leave campaign, has since developed data analytics tools for the NHS and the Ministry of Defence.

Faculty recently came under scrutiny after being tasked with developing software that scans virtual communication platforms for “concerning” posts, which was later used to monitor online debates about accommodation for asylum seekers.

Faculty declined to comment on its role in the ANPR initiative.

Chief Constable Chris Todd, chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Data and Analytics Committee, described the system as “a small-scale, exploratory, operational proof of concept for the potential use of machine learning in conjunction with ANPR data”.

He said the test used “only a very small subset of the ANPR data” and stressed that “data protection and security measures are in place and an ethics committee has been set up to monitor the work”.

William Webster, the Commissioner for Biometrics and Surveillance Cameras, stated that the Home Office is consulting on new legal frameworks for digital and biometric policing tools, including ANPR.

“Supervision is a key component of this framework,” he said, adding that tests of this kind should take place in a “safe space” that ensures “transparency and accountability from the outset.”

A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry stated that the app is “designed to support investigations into serious and organized crime” and is currently being tested “on a small scale” with “a small subset of the data collected by the national ANPR network”.

From a data protection perspective, the concern lies not only in the collection of movement data, but also in what can be deduced from it.

By linking millions of journeys to behavioural models, the system could ultimately create a real-time map of population movements across the country.

Once this analytical capability becomes part of routine police work, the distinction between monitoring suspects and monitoring citizens could become completely blurred.

 

yogaesoteric
January 25, 2026

 

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