Switzerland, Canton of St. Gallen
Kantonspolizei St. Gallen
Griffeye Analyze DI Pro image search including face comparison, supplied by Griffeye
OperationalJournalismPAI-9552539B
- Body
- Kantonspolizei St. Gallen
- Country
- Switzerland
- Area
- Canton of St. Gallen
- Technology
- Griffeye Analyze DI Pro image search including face comparison
- Supplier
- Griffeye
- Status
- Operational
In routine use by the named body, on the evidence of a public source. - Stage
- In use now
- Since
- Not known
- Legal basis
- Disputed. Monika Simmler, professor of criminal law at the University of St. Gallen, told SRF that the criminal procedure code lists permitted measures and that use is unlawful without a change in law; the force's head of criminal investigation, Stefan Kühne, said the existing basis is sufficient.
- Oversight
- Not stated in the source
- Evidence
- Journalism
Named reporting by a reputable outlet - Source
- SRF, 26 January 2022
- Last checked
- Record code
PAI-9552539B
Notes
SRF (26 January 2022) reported that the Kantonspolizei St. Gallen confirmed to the programme Rundschau that it had used facial recognition software for about a year, only for serious offences and about a dozen times: in a bank-robbery example, investigators built a suspect image from crime-scene video, searched other seized footage and compared faces with the police identification (ED) database of over 90,000 people, getting about 2,000 possible matches, which SRF attributes to a hat, sunglasses and poor video quality; the force described the result as a time-saving pre-selection. The members who tabled a 2021 Zürich cantonal inquiry (KR-Nr. 128/2021) cite a newspaper report of 17 April 2021 naming the tool as Analyze DI Pro from the Swedish company Griffeye. An interpellation in the St. Gallen cantonal parliament (51.24.93, 2 December 2024) says the police told the NZZ am Sonntag (3 November 2024) that they use facial recognition for evaluating mass data, and refers to the use as already practised; a 2026 written question in the Basel-Stadt parliament (26.5151) also cites St. Gallen's use of Griffeye. No usage figures after 2022 were found.
Griffeye Analyze DI Pro image search including face comparison elsewhere in Switzerland
See them in the tracker| Deployment | Country | Supplier | Since | Status | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fedpol (Swiss Federal Office of Police)Facial image comparison module (Gesichtsbildabgleich) in the AFIS biometric system | SwitzerlandFederal | Thales DIS Schweiz | — | Proposed | |
| Kantonspolizei AargauOosto facial recognition for comparing investigative images with police image data | SwitzerlandCanton of Aargau | Oosto | — | Operational |