While she may be on her way out, there are still plenty of opportunities for Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick to show off her PR skills. Take this incident recorded by Big Brother Watch yesterday when the Metropolitan Police tried showing off their new facial recognition system, another civil liberties slow-motion car crash visible from space. When the civil liberties group caught word of the photoshoot they popped over to ask Dick some questions about the system, not least the impending mass-privacy breach. Her defence? They’re a “great bit of technology”, however “nobody’s privacy was intruded on” that afternoon since they hadn’t actually managed to get the cameras working…

When challenged by Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo about the 95% rate of misidentification by the technology, the Commissioner loftily replied that she was “not going to get into the debate about 95%” as “that’s not the position we have”. The final straw came when she was asked by a campaigner about the cameras working even more poorly with women and people of colour. Asked what she’d say to the innocent young black boy who had been wrongly flagged by facial recognition cameras as a wanted criminal last month, Dame Cressida didn’t respond and promptly walked off…