UK Moves Forward With National Facial-Recognition Plan Amid Concerns Over Racial Misidentification
UK ministers have launched a 10-week consultation as they prepare to expand a nationwide facial-recognition system intended to help police track suspects. Officials say the programme will review regulatory and privacy frameworks, but many signs point to a broad rollout regardless of the public feedback period.
Independent testing by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has raised a significant concern: the technology appears more likely to misidentify non-white people. The NPL found that a national retrospective facial-recognition tool produced markedly different false-positive rates across ethnic groups — roughly 0.04% for white subjects, compared with 4.0% for Asian subjects and 5.5% for Black subjects.
'This has meant that in some circumstances it is more likely to incorrectly match Black and Asian people than their white counterparts,' the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners told The Guardian, warning that the technical language obscures a clear operational risk.
National police minister Sarah Jones has called facial recognition the 'biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching.' Yet some police commissioners and civil-rights groups say the NPL findings expose an inbuilt bias that should give policymakers pause before scaling the system nationally.
London is already among the world's most heavily surveilled cities, with an estimated 1,552 cameras per square mile. The Home Office has funded seven additional metropolitan police forces to deploy facial-recognition vans, joining forces in London, South Wales and Essex that already operate the vehicles. Each van is linked to a police watchlist and uses roof-mounted AI cameras to compare faces in public spaces against watchlists.
As part of the consultation, the government is asking whether police should be allowed to cross-reference their watchlists with other government databases such as passport and driver’s licence registries. Ministers have signalled a major expansion of the technology — including plans for a central database reportedly holding 'millions of images' of people who have not been accused or convicted of crimes.
'The racial bias in these stats shows the damaging real-life impacts of letting police use facial recognition without proper safeguards in place,' said Charlie Whelton of advocacy group Liberty. 'The government must halt the rapid rollout until safeguards are in place to protect our rights.'
The consultation will gather public feedback, but critics argue that the combination of demonstrable bias, broad surveillance infrastructure and plans for extensive data collection raises serious civil liberties and privacy concerns that should be addressed before any nationwide deployment.
