UK Law Enforcement Agencies Lobbied to Employ Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems

Police forces across the UK effectively campaigned to use a facial recognition system acknowledged as discriminatory against women, youths, and members of ethnic minority groups, following complaints that a less biased version generated a reduced number of investigative leads.

How the System Works

British police use the national police database to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches. This procedure involves comparing a reference photograph of a suspect against a database of more than 19 million custody photos to identify potential matches.

Admitted Bias

The UK interior ministry conceded last week that the system was biased. This acknowledgment followed a review by the government's National Physical Laboratory determined it misidentified people of Black and Asian heritage and women at significantly higher rates than Caucasian males. The ministry said it “took steps on the findings”.

“It prompts the question of whether facial recognition only becomes effective if users tolerate biases in race and sex. Operational ease is a poor argument for disregarding fundamental rights.”

Long-Standing Problem

Official papers show that this discriminatory flaw has been known about for more than a year. Furthermore, law enforcement argued to overturn an initial decision that was designed to address the problem.

Police bosses were notified of the system's bias in late 2024. The government-ordered laboratory study concluded the system was had a higher probability to suggest incorrect matches for photos of women, individuals of Black ethnicity, and those aged 40 and under.

A Reversed Decision

In reaction, the national police leadership body mandated that the accuracy setting required for potential matches be increased to a point where the disparity was significantly reduced.

However, this decision was overturned the following month after forces complained that the adjusted system was generating fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents indicate the higher threshold cut the number of queries that yielded potential matches from 56% to a mere under 15%.

Severe Disparities

Although the Home Office and NPCC refused to say what setting is currently used, the latest NPL study found the system could produce false positives for Black women nearly a hundred times more often than for white women at certain settings.

The ministry commented on these results: “Our evaluation found that in a specific scenarios the software is more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results.”

Balancing Utility and Fairness

Describing the impact of the temporary raise to the system's accuracy setting, the police records note: “The change significantly reduces the impact of discrimination across protected characteristics of race, age and gender but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The papers further note that police units complained that “a previously useful tool returned outcomes of questionable value”.

Wider Implementation Proposals

Meanwhile, the government has launched a two-and-a-half-month consultation on its plans to widen the use of biometric scanning systems. Policing minister Sarah Jones has labeled the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

Abimbola Johnson, head of the independent scrutiny and oversight board for the police race action plan, said: “There was very little consideration in equality strategy sessions of the facial recognition rollout even with clear relevance with the strategy's goals.

“These revelations show yet again that the anti-racism commitments policing has undertaken via the race action plan are failing to be integrated into broader operations. Our reports have warned that innovative tools are being rolled out in a landscape where racial disparities, inadequate oversight and faulty information gathering already persist.

“Any use of facial recognition must meet rigorous official guidelines, be subject to external review, and prove it diminishes rather than compounds racial disparity.”

Home Office Response

A government representative said: “The Home Office treat the findings of the report seriously and we have implemented changes. A updated software has been independently tested and acquired, which has no statistically significant bias. It will be trialled in the coming months and will be subject to further assessment.

“The foremost aim is protecting the public. This gamechanging technology will assist police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in every step of the procedure and no arrest or charge would be taken without specialist personnel meticulously examining the results.”