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Police to use facial recognition near Boardmasters festival
Devon and Cornwall Police will deploy live facial recognition (LFR) technology in Newquay this week as part of security measures around the Boardmasters festival, which runs from 5 to 9 August 2026 and features headline sets from Lily Allen, Kasabian and Fatboy Slim. The cameras will operate in the town rather than at the festival site itself in Watergate Bay, with police saying the aim is to reduce violence against women and girls, tackle organised crime, identify sexual offenders and stop drugs entering the county.
A police van fitted with a biometric camera will scan faces in Killacourt against a watch list of known criminals, suspects and individuals subject to sexual harm prevention orders, with images of uninvolved members of the public deleted within seconds. The move follows criticism of the 2024 and 2025 festivals, which saw a crowd surge causing hospitalisations, multiple arrests, and spiking allegations; organisers reported 14 spiking cases in 2025, down from 55 the previous year, with all on-site tests returning negative results.
In short
- Police to use live facial recognition in Newquay during Boardmasters 2026
- Aim: curb violence, crime, sexual offences and drug trafficking
- Follows past incidents including crowd surges and spiking allegations
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Facial recognition technology, when deployed with proper safeguards such as deletion of innocent images and targeted watch lists rather than mass surveillance, represents a legitimate law enforcement tool to address documented harms. The Boardmasters festival has experienced serious incidents including crowd surges causing hospitalisations, sexual offences, and spiking allegations, making targeted crime prevention reasonable and justified, particularly to protect vulnerable festival-goers from violence and sexual assault. Identifying and stopping known criminals, suspects, and sexual offenders before they can commit crimes serves a genuine public safety purpose that can be achieved with careful operational controls.
The case against
Mass facial recognition in public spaces, regardless of stated safeguards, represents a concerning expansion of surveillance that threatens fundamental privacy rights and civil liberties. There are legitimate concerns about the accuracy and potential for misuse of such technology, and deploying it now sets a precedent normalising pervasive public surveillance that could be extended to other events and contexts without clear limits. The significant reduction in spiking cases from 55 to 14 between 2024 and 2025 without facial recognition, combined with broader questions about whether this invasive measure is proportionate to actual risk, suggests the technology is not a necessary response to the documented problems.
Explained simply
Boardmasters is a large annual music festival held near Newquay in Cornwall. The festival site is at Watergate Bay, while the town centre can also be busy with festivalgoers and other visitors.
Live facial recognition uses cameras to compare people’s faces with a police watch list. Devon and Cornwall Police say the list can include known criminals, suspects and people subject to sexual harm prevention orders; images of people who are not matched are deleted quickly.
The festival has faced scrutiny over crowd safety, arrests and reports of spiking in recent years. Spiking means putting alcohol or drugs into someone’s drink without their knowledge, and it can be difficult to establish what happened; the issue has prompted attention to safety around the event.