Facial Recognition Policing Grows

The Unblinking Eye: Facial Recognition Pervades British Policing

Internal police documents suggest systems identifying faces in real time are poised to become a fixture across England and Wales. The quantity of individual visages processed by this technology has dramatically increased, doubling to nearly five million over the preceding twelve months alone, signalling a profound shift in law enforcement methods.

A collaborative inquiry involving The Guardian alongside the organisation Liberty Investigates reveals the alarming pace at which facial identification technology is integrating into the fabric of policing methodology in Britain. Authorities are channelling substantial funds towards this expansion and actively acquiring the necessary hardware. Simultaneously, the UK government is exploring avenues to grant law enforcement agencies broader access to its extensive reserves of images, encompassing records from passports and immigration, for inquiries based on past face matching. This rapid adoption occurs amidst growing unease from civil liberties groups and persistent questions regarding the technology's regulatory framework, accuracy, and potential for bias.

Understanding Facial Recognition: Live and Retrospective

Real-time facial identification functions by matching visages captured by monitoring equipment against an official list of individuals for immediate comparison. Campaigners express concern that this methodology is akin to the continuous, indiscriminate collection of citizen biometric data during their everyday activities. In contrast, law enforcement utilizes software for historical face matching to align stored pictures with visuals from video surveillance and different recording apparatus. Both applications are seeing expanded use.

The Home Office describes deployments of real-time systems as "targeted, intelligence-led, time-bound, and geographically limited," aiming to identify suspects more rapidly and accurately. However, the increasing reliance on this technology raises significant questions about individual privacy and the evolving nature of public surveillance.

Expansion and Funding: A Glimpse into Police Aspirations

A financial plan document, prepared by the police force in South Wales as part of a suggestion to implement real-time face scanning systems at either London's West End or the Cardiff train station, and made public by the Met police following a Freedom of Information request, indicates a belief. The document suggests this kind of technology might see widespread adoption in urban centers and major transportation points throughout England and Wales. While these specific widespread plans for the West End were scaled back, the ambition remains. Met officials have indicated that installing a network of such devices in London's West End is still a possibility.

Significant investment underpins this technological expansion. A new procurement framework, managed by BlueLight Commercial, worth up to £20 million, is now active. This framework, running from April 2025 to March 2029, allows constabularies to acquire solutions for identifying faces in real time from pre-approved suppliers like Bedroq, Digital Barriers Services, and NEC Software Solutions without needing to conduct individual competitive tenders. The UK government also announced a £55.5 million investment in this type of technology over the next four years in April 2024. Furthermore, the provisional police funding settlement for 2025-26 will see funding to police forces total up to £17.4 billion, a cash increase of 6.0% compared to 2024-25, with overall system funding reaching £19.5 billion.

First Permanent Cameras and Growing Deployments

The initial stationary real-time face scanning equipment installations are planned for a test phase in south London's Croydon area during the summer of 2025. These two devices will be positioned in the town centre, attached to buildings and lampposts. Police state they will only activate the equipment when officers are present in the area to respond to potential identifications. This move follows earlier considerations by the Metropolitan Police and the police in South Wales, who jointly bid for £1.6 million from the Home Office to establish fixed infrastructure for identifying faces in real time, aiming to create "zones of safety" in London's West End and at the Cardiff train station.

The use of mobile units for identifying faces in real time has also surged. In 2024, vans equipped for this purpose were deployed on no fewer than 256 occasions, a significant increase from 63 deployments the previous year. The count of visages analyzed by police LFR equipment reached nearly 4.7 million last year, more than double the figure for 2023. A new Home Office-funded roving unit of ten LFR vans, deployable nationwide, is expected to become available shortly, substantially boosting the country's overall capability. Currently, at least eight distinct constabularies are known to have utilised the technology, including the Metropolitan Police, which operates four vans, alongside forces in Bedfordshire, Essex, Hampshire, Northamptonshire, North Wales, South Wales, and Suffolk. Suffolk Police's LFR trial in Ipswich in February 2025 scanned 47,000 faces, leading to five arrests.

Image Credit - Independent

Legal Landscape: A Patchwork of Regulations

A striking aspect of this expansion is that the term 'facial recognition' does not appear in any single parliamentary act. Advocacy groups assert that law enforcement has received permission for what amounts to autonomous governance regarding their application of this tech. The current legal framework relies on a combination of existing laws, including common law police powers to prevent and detect crime, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010, and the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.

Following a 2020 decision from the court of appeal in the case of Ed Bridges against South Wales Police, determining the force's LFR use was illegal, the policing academic body issued advice. The guidance indicated that careful calibration of the benchmark is necessary to enhance the likelihood of accurate detections while maintaining incorrect identifications at a manageable frequency. However, current legislation does not contain anything to instruct police units concerning the specific benchmark or technological approach employed. The College of Policing's Authorised Professional Practice (APP) on LFR aims to ensure its overt use is legally compliant and ethical. It also highlights the importance of public information regarding LFR deployments.

Government Acknowledges Need for Review

Diane Johnson, the minister for policing, informed the legislature recently in the current month. She acknowledged a requirement for deliberation on the necessity of a specific legal structure to regulate how law enforcement utilizes real-time facial identification technology, but the Home Office has not yet offered specifics. This acknowledgement came after she initiated a programme of engagement in late 2024 regarding LFR use by police, aiming to secure and maintain public confidence in the absence of a specific law. Despite these discussions, officials have yet to provide concrete details of any forthcoming bill. The Biometrics Institute has called for a unified UK policy, highlighting the current "postcode lottery" of differing interpretations and inconsistent approaches across the 43 police forces.

Facial Recognition Database Access: Expanding the Net

Constabularies are increasingly utilising inquiries based on past face matching. The volume of these RFR searches using the Police National Database (PND) nearly doubled during the past year, from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798. An inspectorate has even urged UK police forces to “fully exploit” RFR, recommending no investigation be closed before cross-checking images against available databases. The PND holds arrest photographs. A significant number of these images, in the millions, authorities have determined their retention lacks legal basis, pertaining to individuals never accused or found guilty of any wrongdoing. The outgoing Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Tony Eastaugh, warned about the unchecked expansion of surveillance technologies and the potential use of these unlawfully retained images.

Facial Recognition: Database Searches Increase

Beyond the PND, access to other significant data repositories is also increasing. Within the preceding 24 months, police carried out more than one thousand facial identification inquiries employing the United Kingdom's passport records. This database holds images of approximately 46 million British passport holders. Revelations from Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph showed this practice has been occurring secretly since at least 2019, with a dramatic increase in searches in the months leading up to former policing minister Chris Philp's October 2023 announcement of plans to use passport photos for identifying suspects in common crimes like burglary and shoplifting. In the first nine months of 2023 alone, forces searched the passport database over 300 times. The Metropolitan Police Service was responsible for nearly a third of these searches.

Officers are also making more requests to search the immigration records of the Home Office, with 110 such requests last year. Internal papers state that authorities have determined employing passport records for facial identification poses minimal danger and lacks contentious elements, noting that the Home Office had not sought advice from the Information Commissioner on this specific use. However, the Information Commissioner's Office has since stated it is engaging with the Home Office on the use of the passport database.

Image Credit - CCN

The Strategic Facial Recognition Matcher: A National System Looms

Currently, the Home Office collaborates with law enforcement to develop a novel nationwide facial identification apparatus, termed the strategic facial matcher. This system will possess the functionality to query diverse data repositories, encompassing arrest pictures and files from immigration. The project aims to deliver infrastructure, software services, and data migration for this national service. The Home Office Biometrics (HOB) unit manages the SFM project and already operates a Biometrics Services Gateway (BSG) for storing and searching biometric data, currently used by 35 police forces and Immigration Enforcement for mobile fingerprint checks. The plan is to extend this capability to facial matching, including Operator Initiated Facial Recognition (OIFR), which involves officers using mobile devices to scan faces. An initial minimum viable product for historical facial identification was targeted for Spring 2024.

Accuracy and Bias: Persistent Concerns

Despite police assurances, concerns about the accuracy and potential bias of LFR technology persist. While the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) conducted tests on algorithms used by the Metropolitan Police and the South Wales constabulary, finding them "highly accurate" and without statistically significant ethnic or gender differences at the settings generally used by police, critics point to several issues. The NPL study tested only one algorithm, whereas different forces may use various LFR systems with differing accuracy levels.

Previously, LFR configurations employed by officials demonstrated a higher error rate in identifying individuals of Black ethnicity. Reports from groups like Big Brother Watch have previously highlighted high inaccuracy rates in LFR deployments by both the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police. An independent report from the University of Essex in 2019 on the Met's LFR trials found verifiable accuracy in less than 20% of cases, suggesting a high number of unnecessary stops. More recently, at a commonly used accuracy threshold, one system reportedly misidentified 13 Black and Asian individuals, while no white individuals were falsely flagged.

The case of Shaun Thompson, a Black community worker who was wrongly flagged by a Met LFR system in February 2024 and detained despite providing identification, underscores these concerns. He is now pursuing legal action. Civil society groups argue that given findings of institutional racism within policing, such as in the Casey Review of the Metropolitan Police, deploying LFR risks embedding and exacerbating existing discriminatory practices. Concerns also focus on the disproportionate deployment of LFR in areas with higher Black populations, such as Croydon, Lewisham, and Haringey.

Public Trust and Justification

Lindsey Chiswick, who serves as the intelligence director for the Met and also leads on facial identification for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, stated that polling indicates 80 percent of London residents endorse law enforcement's adoption of novel tech, which encompasses facial identification systems. She argued that with limited funding, fewer officers, and increasing demand, alongside lawbreakers leveraging technology extensively, policing needs to adopt new methods. Chiswick also mentioned the Met’s strategy involves proceeding with very gradual advancements, reassessing at each point. However, she also acknowledged a potential advantage to having some form of regulatory structure or official directives. The Met asserts it deploys LFR at a setting that testing indicates avoids statistically significant gender or ethnic background disparities in instances of incorrect identification.

However, campaigners argue that LFR operations often feel like a "continuous police line-up" and erode trust. The Biometrics Institute stresses that responsible use requires informed decision-making, clear communication, and transparency. Liberty maintains that police use of facial recognition should, at a minimum, require independent judicial sign-off, ensure watchlists only include those reasonably suspected of serious crimes, and never target protesters, journalists, or those near polling stations.

High-Profile Cases and Arrest Statistics

Police highlight successful LFR deployments. Recently, David Cheneler, a 73-year-old convicted sex offender residing in Lewisham, received a two-year prison sentence. A real-time facial identification device detected him unaccompanied with a young female child aged six, violating his conditions. Cheneler had earlier completed a nine-year sentence connected to twenty-one child-related crimes. In 2024, the Met apprehended 587 individuals aided by real-time facial identification equipment; authorities subsequently filed charges against 424 of these people for various infractions. Among those taken into custody, 58 were known sex offenders seriously violating their release terms, and legal proceedings commenced against 38 of them. South Wales Police also reported that a trial in March 2022 resulted in three positive identifications and two arrests. They also cite the case of Craig Walters, jailed for life in 2021 after RFR helped identify him from CCTV following an attack.

The Future Trajectory

The trajectory of facial recognition in British policing points towards deeper integration and wider application. The Home Office's development of the strategic facial matcher, coupled with significant ongoing investment and the creation of national procurement frameworks, signals a clear intent to expand its use. While proponents cite its effectiveness in identifying suspects and aiding investigations, the rapid rollout continues to outpace specific legislative frameworks and fuel concerns about privacy, accuracy, potential misuse, and the creation of a pervasive surveillance environment. The coming years will be crucial in determining whether robust legal safeguards and oversight mechanisms can be established to govern this powerful technology and maintain public confidence. The debate over balancing security benefits with fundamental civil liberties remains central to the future of policing in the digital age.