Two police vans were parked up inside the Eden Centre as part of a live facial recognition rollout, using CCTV cameras and computer systems to search for people on a "watchlist".

On March 3, the facial recognition vans parked outside M&S in a busy section of the High Wycombe shopping centre near the bus station.

There were also around 14 police officers in attendance.

Sergeant Martin Smith from the force's specialist live facial recognition team described the technology being used in town.

He said: "Each of the vans has got two cameras on them and they've got a pre-loaded watchlist of people that are wanted by the police and the courts and missing people.

"As people then walk through the two areas that we're looking at, it will generate an alert if someone is matched on the watch list and that alert will then tell us what they're on the system for and we'll go and speak to them.

"If they're not matched on the system at all, then within 0.2 seconds it then deletes that picture straight off the system and there's no data held on the van afterwards."

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Multiple arrests and identifications were made during the Eden Centre deployment.

Addressing concerns about system bias, the Sergeant said: "There has been some system bias in some of the other types of facial recognition, but with live, it uses a completely different set of system software, a different algorithm, and we can confirm that there's no system bias.

"I think that's what people get confused with.

"It doesn't see a white face, a black face, a male face, a female face."