🔗 Share this article

Law enforcement agencies across the UK effectively campaigned to deploy a facial recognition system known to be discriminatory against females, youths, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that a more accurate version produced a reduced number of investigative leads.

How the System Works

UK forces use the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This procedure involves matching a reference photograph of a person of interest against a database of more than 19 million mugshots to find possible hits.

Acknowledged Discrimination

The UK interior ministry conceded last week that the system was flawed. This admission followed a review by the government's National Physical Laboratory determined it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men. The Home Office stated it “took steps on the findings”.

“It prompts the question of whether this technology only becomes useful if users tolerate discrimination in race and gender. Operational ease is a poor argument for disregarding basic freedoms.”

Known Issue

Official papers show that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for more than a year. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an initial decision that was designed to mitigate the problem.

Senior officers were notified of the system's bias in late 2024. The Home Office-commissioned laboratory study concluded the system was had a higher probability to suggest incorrect matches for photos of women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under.

A Reversed Decision

In response, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) mandated that the accuracy setting required for possible hits be increased to a point where the bias was greatly diminished.

However, this decision was reversed the following month following complaints from police that the modified technology was producing fewer “investigative leads”. NPCC documents show the stricter setting reduced the number of queries resulting in possible identifications from over half to a mere 14%.

Profound Inequalities

Although the authorities refused to say what threshold is now in operation, the recent independent review found the system could generate false positives for women of Black heritage nearly a hundred times more frequently than for white women at specific configurations.

The Home Office commented on these findings: “Our evaluation identified that in a limited set of circumstances the software is more likely to wrongly flag some demographic groups in its match reports.”

Balancing Utility and Fairness

Describing the effect of the brief increase to the system's confidence threshold, the police records note: “The change greatly lessens the effect of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, age and gender but had a substantially detrimental effect on operational effectiveness”. The papers add that police units complained that “a previously useful tool returned results of limited benefit”.

Broader Rollout Plans

Meanwhile, the government has opened a ten-week public review on its proposals to expand the use of biometric scanning systems. Policing minister Sarah Jones has labeled the technology as the “most significant advance since genetic fingerprinting”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

Abimbola Johnson, chair of the independent scrutiny and oversight board for the police race action plan, commented: “There was very little discussion in equality strategy sessions of the technology deployment even with clear relevance with the strategy's goals.

“These revelations demonstrate yet again that the pledges to combat discrimination policing has made through the equality initiative are failing to be integrated into broader operations. Independent assessments have warned that new technologies are being implemented in a landscape where ethnic inequalities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection already persist.

“All deployment of facial recognition must adhere to rigorous official guidelines, be subject to external review, and prove it diminishes rather than exacerbates ethnic bias.”

Official Statement

A government representative said: “We treat the findings of the study seriously and we have already taken action. A new algorithm has been externally evaluated and procured, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be tested in the coming months and will be undergo evaluation.

“The foremost aim is protecting the public. This revolutionary tool will assist police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in each stage of the procedure and no arrest or charge would be taken without specialist personnel carefully reviewing the output.”