Police forces across Britain are experimenting with artificial intelligence that can automatically monitor and categorize drivers’ movements using the country’s extensive number plate recognition network.
Internal records obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph reveal that three of England and Wales’s nine regional organized crime units are piloting a Faculty AI-built program designed to learn from vehicle movement data and detect journeys that algorithms label “suspicious.”
For years, the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system has logged more than 100 million vehicle sightings each day, mostly for confirming whether a specific registration has appeared in a certain area.
The new initiative changes that logic entirely. Instead of checking isolated plates, it teaches software to trace entire routes, looking for patterns of behavior that resemble the travel of criminal networks known for “county lines” drug trafficking.
The project, called Operation Ignition, represents a change in scale and ambition.
Unlike traditional alerts that depend on officers manually flagging “vehicles of interest,” the machine learning model learns from past data to generate its own list of potential targets.
Official papers admit that the process could involve “millions of [vehicle registrations],” and that the information gathered may guide future decisions about the ethical and operational use of such technologies.
What began as a Home Office-funded trial in the North West covering Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, and North Wales has now expanded into three regional crime units.
Hellbound and Down 