Cumbria Police used live facial recognition at Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria for the first time this year, putting the technology in front of one of the country’s biggest annual gatherings as officers mounted their largest operation of the weekend.
More than 200 officers will be working 24/7, and police said as many as an extra 50,000 people were expected in the town this weekend. The cameras were described by the force as a way to make the event safer, with Det Supt Dan St Quintin saying the system should help make the fair a more enjoyable experience for everyone.
That matters because Appleby is not a small local show. Tens of thousands of visitors come every year, and the fair sits at the center of a long-running conversation between police and the Gypsy Roma and traveller community about safety, visibility and whether the place can be managed without making people feel watched. This weekend, the balance shifted. The same technology used in airports and major festivals is now being used on the crowd at Appleby itself, for the first time.
Not everyone sees that as a problem. Billy Welch, the Gypsy and traveller representative on the fair’s organising group, said most of the community did not mind the technology and that he supported it. He said he was not bothered by its use at the fair, adding that if you have done nothing wrong, you have got nothing to worry about. St Quintin went further, saying the vast majority of the community would like live face recognition there because they feel safe, and that higher numbers this year were mainly because people felt able to come again.
At the same time, the new measure raises a question the police have not fully answered in public: how, exactly, the system is being used at the fair, and what safeguards govern the handling of data when it is deployed across a large moving crowd. For Danny Jones, who came from Cardiff and said he first visited 30 years ago, the appeal remains simpler than the technology. “The atmosphere you got here, you can’t buy it,” he said. “You’ve got to come here, and you’ve got to experience it.”
