Police Commissioner Andrew Coster and Howie Tamati.
Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Coster was at Aotearoa Marae in Okaiawa today to mark the expansion into Taranaki of Te Pae Oranga - a programme that aims to keep low-level offenders out of the courts.
The province is the 16th region in the country to establish a Te Pae Oranga Panel which has been credited with reducing reoffending by 22 percent elsewhere. There is no use of police photos for facial recognition unless it is someone who is an unidentified suspect for an offence. So, that technology is used for identifying suspects of offences, it is not used randomly on young people.