Moscow official says facial recognition helped catch 34 wanted suspects over New Year holidays

Dmitry Golovin, who leads the Moscow IT Department’s video surveillance division, has revealed during a forum called Security Technologies that 105,000 of the city’s security cameras are connected to a facial recognition system.

Over the course of Russia’s New Year holidays, Golovin added, that system helped state officials arrest 34 individuals who had been wanted by the federal government “for three or four years and had been walking free throughout Moscow” during that time.

“The federal search database contains more than 200,000 photographs, and it would be impossible for anyone to remember them all and check them against similar images,” Golovin explained. “Our [facial recognition] system allows us to turn this into a truly functional operation.”