“The arrest figure from across the weekend shows that the messaging in the lead up to the event, and the policing during it, were effective in deterring criminal activity..."

Police state surveillance is, by its own perverse motives, self justifying. Among the many thousands in attendance only a couple arrests were made with its help, and so "it was a powerful deterrent!" If it caught many more, then we'd hear them crow about that. If it made false positives, then additional spending would be called for to improve the systems.

Once the money is spent and the people have submitted to be passively datamined, there's no possible result, other than firm protest, that would call the practice into question. Sadly we are too used to surveillance.

I'm sure there is copper and other metals that can be sold in these cameras. Has anyone notified the local scrappers?

Were the right people arrested though?

“Individuals who do not trigger an alert have their image and biometric data deleted immediately which is irretrievable"

“This is a function that has been built into the software which has been tested independently by the National Physics Laboratory. We would like to reassure the public that the data is irretrievable once deleted.”

Why would a governmental agency responsible for measurements and standards be put in charge of verifying cybersecurity functionality??

Also what about false positives? Do those innocent people get their data stored? And for how long?

There's something extremely unsettling about the police being able to issue an arrest warrant on anyone and then use surveillance to arrest them anywhere. I can hear bootlickers already saying "don't commit crimes and you're fine" but I wonder if they would have used the same argument against the suffragettes...