Police miss deadline to delete unlawfully gathered photos of young Māori

Police have unlawfully been collecting photos of Maori youths, according to an inquiry. Photo / File

By Phil Pennington of RNZ

Police have missed a deadline to delete a trove of unlawfully gathered photos of children and young people.

They have discovered they have so many photos scattered about so widely, they need a new plan to deal with them.

An RNZ inquiry in 2021 led to police being ordered to stop taking casual photos of the public, and delete tens of thousands of the pictures.

But they have not been able to because of the masses of photos, many unlabelled and in many different systems. The official inquiry noted how officers were storing pictures of rangatahi Māori in an unstructured way on their work smartphones.

“The lack of metadata (labelling) coupled with extremely large data holdings has meant that implementing a solution of this size and scale is not achievable at this time,” police told RNZ on Friday.

“Lack of metadata creates challenges with identifying relevant photographs.”

They have got as far as coming up with a plan to delete the photos, and costing it. They did not give the cost.

The privacy commissioner has extended the deadline to mid-2025, but also given police more to do.

They must now create more controls for accessing and using potentially non-compliant photos.

“Exploratory work” on this was now under way with police’s chief information officer and information capability team, police said.

These are the last two out of over a dozen directives imposed on police by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) in 2022.

These included having to stop the practice of randomly and casually taking people’s photos, or doing so two times over at a police station, one time officially but a second casually (police said this was with the consent of a person or their whānau, but the OPC rejected that as proper consent).

They also had to dump all the fingerprints they had taken unlawfully, including at the station in this dual, casual way.

Police early on objected that curtailing the practices and deleting the photos would impede their frontline ability to do criminal investigations.

They told RNZ they have now got comprehensive procedures and guidelines around photographing and videoing members of the public, that aligns with legislation.

They recently did a review of smartphone use across 12 districts, and including the Police College, with the results being used now to build “awareness, educate, and engage frontline officers and other staff to drive further improvements in policy and legislative compliance”.

They recently updated instructions to staff about biometrics which include photos and fingerprints.