UK Police Forces Lobbied to Employ Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems

Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to deploy a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, youths, and individuals from ethnic minority groups, following complaints that a less biased version produced a reduced number of potential suspects.

How the System Works

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

Admitted Bias

The UK interior ministry admitted last week that the system was flawed. This acknowledgment came after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at much greater frequency than white men. The Home Office said it “took steps on the findings”.

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

Long-Standing Problem

Official papers show that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for more than a year. Furthermore, law enforcement lobbied to reverse an earlier ruling that was designed to mitigate the problem.

Senior officers were notified of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The Home Office-commissioned laboratory study found the system was had a higher probability to produce incorrect matches for images depicting females, individuals of Black ethnicity, and those aged 40 and under.

A Policy U-Turn

In response, the national police leadership body mandated that the accuracy setting required for possible hits be increased to a point where the disparity was greatly diminished.

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

Profound Inequalities

Although the Home Office and NPCC declined to specify what threshold is currently used, the latest independent review found the system could generate incorrect matches for Black women nearly a hundred times more often than for white women at certain settings.

The ministry stated on these results: “Our evaluation identified that in a specific scenarios the software is has a greater tendency 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 state: “This adjustment greatly lessens the impact of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of race, age and sex but had a significant negative impact on operational effectiveness”. The papers add that police units argued that “a previously useful tool now delivered outcomes of limited benefit”.

Broader Rollout Plans

Meanwhile, the government has launched a ten-week public review on its proposals to widen the use of facial recognition technology. The minister for police the relevant minister has described the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since genetic fingerprinting”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

The chair of a police oversight board, chair of the independent scrutiny and oversight board for the police race action plan, commented: “We observed very little discussion through equality strategy sessions of the facial recognition rollout despite clear relevance with the strategy's goals.

“This disclosure demonstrate yet again that the anti-racism commitments policing has undertaken through the race action plan are not being translated into broader operations. Our reports have warned that new technologies are being implemented in a context where ethnic inequalities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist.

“All deployment of this technology must adhere to strict national standards, be subject to external review, and demonstrate it diminishes rather than compounds racial disparity.”

Official Statement

A government representative stated: “We treat the conclusions of the report seriously and we have implemented changes. 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 further assessment.

“Our priority is protecting the public. This gamechanging technology will support police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is officer review in every step of the procedure and no further action would be pursued without trained officers meticulously examining the results.”