No one has time to look at all the surveillance cameras all the time.

But a computer can.

With artificial intelligence in the form of face recognition, you get an unlimited number of "cops" who sit and watch what happens, in real time.

This is the reality in China, Russia and the United Kingdom, for example.

Method that arouses debate

Such face recognition in real time encounters more privacy-legal obstacles than what has become more widespread - to scan imagery afterwards.

But even that method arouses debate.

In the United States, there are several examples of people who have been arrested by mistake.

What the cases have in common is that those who have fallen victim are African-Americans.

The explanation is believed to be that computer programs have not been trained enough to recognize certain types of appearances.

Several of the big tech companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft, have responded by temporarily stopping selling face recognition tools to the police.

But there is no shortage of alternatives.

Clearview AI ended up in the hot air when it was revealed that the company vacuumed social media in 3 billion images, which they now use for face recognition.

Starts in a few weeks

Swedish police who tested the app were able to identify a child who had been the victim of a sexual crime.

But recently, the Privacy Protection Authority cracked down on it because the police lacked legal support to use such a service.

- In that case, they had not reached out with their routines to the employees enough and could not show that it was absolutely necessary to use it, says Jenny Bård, lawyer at the Privacy Protection Authority.

However, the police have been given the go-ahead to use automatic image analysis of large amounts of image material obtained in the preliminary investigation in criminal investigations.

It should be commissioned within a few weeks.

In previous tests, it has led to being able to proceed to prosecution, says Niclas Appleby, forensic scientist at the police's NFC.

Among other things, it was tested at Operation Rimfrost.

- There we helped to search for a car the perpetrators used at the time of the crime.

We wanted to see where the car was the day before the murder and checked surveillance footage.