A man was arrested at a pop concert last weekend after police used facial recognition technology to locate him.

The suspect, identified only as Mr Ao, was one of 60,000 attendees at a show for pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang city.

Thanks to the recognition tech, he was identified by cameras at the concert’s ticket entrance, and later arrested by police after he had sat down with other concert goers.


You can see footage of the arrest here. According to the BBC, China has a surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras.

Police officer Li Jin told state news agency Xinhua that “the suspect looked completely caught by surprise when we took him away.

“He didn’t think the police would be able to catch him from a crowd of 60,000 so quickly,” Mr Li, from Honggutan police station in Nanchang city, added.

Back in 2015, the police force scanned the faces of 90,000 attendees at the Castle Donnington festival in a trial of new counter-crime procedures.

It was the first time the software has been used at an outdoor event in the UK, with police stating that images were compared to a database of criminals who target music festivals across Europe.


During his band’s headline performance at the festival, Muse‘s Matt Bellamy criticised the police’s actions during their rendition of the song ‘Uprising’.

Bellamy told the crowd: “Fuck the Leicestershire police for scanning your faces without you knowing”.

Leicestershire Police’s Chief Constable Simon Cole replied to the criticism, stating that it is the job of the UK Parliament to decide “what is OK or not” in terms of such matters of privacy and crime prevention.