Who? Iain Gould, partner at DPP Law Solicitors, Bootle.
Why is he in the news? Represents 26-year-old software engineer Alvi Choudhury from Southampton. Choudhury is claiming damages from Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary for wrongful arrest, after being arrested for a burglary in Milton Keynes when facial recognition technology confused him with another man.
Thoughts on the case: ‘Technological change is accelerating and there is nothing to be gained by being Luddites about this. We need to work with it, while guarding our civil rights and time-honoured individual liberties. Facial recognition technology can, in principle, be of help to good policing and benefit society; at the same time, it is prey to bad policing, lazy policing, thoughtless and prejudiced policing. Technology which can misidentify black and Asian faces at a higher rate than white faces must be used with extreme caution. Here it has resulted in my client’s arrest, notwithstanding the lack of similarity between Alvi and the suspect, Alvi’s clean record and the fact he lives 100 miles away.’
A Thames Valley Police spokesperson said: ‘While we apologise for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, their arrest was based on the investigating officers’ own visual assessment that the individual matched the suspect in CCTV footage following a retrospective facial recognition match and was not influenced by racial profiling. To confirm, retrospective facial recognition technology did initially provide intelligence, but did not determine the arrest. Although later enquiries eliminated the individual from the investigation, this does not make the arrest unlawful.’
Dealing with the media: ‘I have found it a pleasure to deal with the media. They have treated my client with respect and given him a fantastic platform to speak eloquently about his experience.’
Why become a lawyer? ‘Becoming a solicitor was a natural choice for me. The profession bestows the opportunity to interrogate state power and hold it to account for the benefit of the individual.’
Career high: ‘Fighting the good fight. Whether the amount of damages is a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of pounds, I am proud to have both empowered my client and to be acting as a check against future abuses.’
Career low: ‘The government’s decision to exclude police claims from the [qualified one-way costs shifting] rules. I have campaigned to overturn this. It is very disappointing to have to advise clients that they may be exposed to costs when seeking justice for an unlawful arrest, whereas the victims of “fender-bender” car crashes get full protection.’
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