Facial recognition is bringing more criminals to justice with a 60 per cent increase in positive identifications in Cheshire last year compared to 2024.

Cllr Judy Snowball, (CEC, Lab) chair of the county's police and crime panel, referred to figures from the commissioner's office which revealed there had been 973 positive identifications using facial recognition in 2025.

She said AI and facial recognition was an important tool but added: "We did hear that there wasn't, on my recollection, facial recognition being used at present in Cheshire."

Police commissioner Dan Price (Lab) told the panel meeting on Friday, February 6, it wasn't being used live in Cheshire but was retrospectively.

"The Home Secretary spoke recently about greater deployment of live facial recognition technology, that is not something that is happening in Cheshire at the moment," said Mr Price.

"I am not aware of plans for us to do that right now, but the use of it retrospectively has been invaluable, especially when it comes to things like shop theft.

"I've spoken to a number of stores that have been uploading imagery and it's absolutely brought about justice much, much faster."

The commissioner said it had also been able to piece together incidents whereby an offender was in one part of the county one afternoon, another part the following morning and elsewhere the following day.

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"It's been used to really accurately collate this is a regular offender who is effectively doing this in lots of different areas and, without this facial recognition, pulling that case together would have taken a lot more resource," said Mr Price.

"So, it's absolutely got a role to play in bringing about justice faster."