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I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.

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That was my first thought. They scanned roughly 1% of the UK’s population. No way they didn’t identify any wanted criminals unless the set of wanted criminals scanned for was only a tiny fraction of the overall list.

"Scanned" faces in this instance isn't unique people.

500,000 individual checks could have been for the same person. While that is extremely unlikely, it's also unlikely they scanned 500,000 unique people.

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