Sources

Every factual and legal claim on this site links to where it came from. We prioritise official sources, in this order.

Priority 1

Police forces

Deployment announcements, facial-recognition policies and privacy notices published by forces themselves.

Priority 2

National authorised professional practice on how LFR should be authorised and operated.

Priority 3

Policy documents and official statements about biometrics and surveillance.

Priority 4

The ICO regulates the use of personal and biometric data in the UK.

Priority 5

The legal framework, and court rulings interpreting it.

Priority 6

Used for context and commentary, clearly identified as such rather than as official guidance.

Step 1
Official sources
Police force websites and newsrooms, official police social accounts, published CSV and PDF deployment reports, and GOV.UK and other government sources.
Step 2
Discovery layer
Public web and news searches, restricted to the past week, find newly published force notices and reports that are not yet linked from a force's main page.
Step 3
Ingestion worker
A scheduled job fetches every source and every newly discovered page on a regular cycle.
Step 4
Parser
Each page is read for the police force, deployment date, start and end time where published, location (street, town or venue), coordinates, deployment status, source URL, publication timestamp, last verified timestamp and any published deployment statistics.
Step 5
Validation engine
Is the source official? Is the date current? Was a location extracted? Do multiple independent sources agree? An entry is published automatically only from an official source, or when at least two independent sources agree. Everything else waits for a person to check it.
Step 6
Database
Validated records are stored with a fingerprint so the same deployment is never listed twice, and are removed automatically once they fall outside the current window.
Step 7
This website
Live, today, upcoming and recently ended deployments appear on the map and in the feeds, always with the original source link and the date last checked.

Nothing is taken from private groups or unattributed rumour. Every record carries the link to the page it came from, so you can check it yourself.

Where a source is a news report or a community submission rather than an official publication, we say so on the record itself.