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Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system acknowledged as biased against women, young people, and members of minority ethnic backgrounds, following complaints that a less biased version generated fewer investigative leads.

How the System Works

British police utilize the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This process entails matching a reference photograph of a person of interest against a database of more than 19 million mugshots to identify potential matches.

Acknowledged Discrimination

The Home Office admitted last week that the system was biased. This admission came after a review by the government's National Physical Laboratory determined it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than Caucasian males. The ministry stated it “took steps on the findings”.

“This raises the issue of whether facial recognition only becomes useful if users accept discrimination in ethnicity and gender. Operational ease is a poor argument for disregarding basic freedoms.”

Long-Standing Problem

Internal documents show that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for over twelve months. Furthermore, police forces argued to overturn an earlier ruling that was designed to address the problem.

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

A Policy U-Turn

In response, the national police leadership body ordered that the accuracy setting required for potential matches be raised to a level where the disparity was greatly diminished.

However, this decision was reversed the next month after forces complained that the modified technology was producing fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. Internal records show the stricter setting cut the number of searches resulting in potential matches from over half to a mere 14%.

Severe Disparities

Although the Home Office and NPCC declined to specify what setting is currently used, the latest NPL study found the system could produce incorrect matches for women of Black heritage nearly a hundred times more often than for white women at specific configurations.

The Home Office stated on these results: “The testing identified that in a specific scenarios the algorithm is more likely to wrongly flag some demographic groups in its match reports.”

Operational Effectiveness vs. Bias

Describing the impact of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the NPCC documents note: “This adjustment greatly lessens the impact of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, generation and sex but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The papers add that forces argued that “a previously useful tool returned results of questionable value”.

Wider Implementation Proposals

Meanwhile, the government has opened a ten-week public review on its proposals to expand the use of facial recognition technology. The minister for police Sarah Jones has labeled the technology as the “most significant advance since DNA matching”.

Criticism from Advisors and Monitors

The chair of a police oversight board, chair of the independent scrutiny and oversight board for the police race action plan, said: “There was very little consideration through race action plan meetings of the facial recognition rollout even with obvious cross-over with the strategy's goals.

“This disclosure show yet again that the pledges to combat discrimination the police has undertaken through the equality initiative are not being translated into broader operations. Our reports have warned that new technologies are being rolled out in a landscape where racial disparities, inadequate oversight and poor data collection continue to exist.

“All deployment of facial recognition must adhere to strict national standards, be independently scrutinised, and prove it reduces rather than exacerbates ethnic bias.”

Home Office Response

A Home Office spokesperson stated: “The Home Office treat the findings of the study with utmost gravity and we have already taken action. A updated software has been independently tested and procured, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be tested early next year and will be undergo evaluation.

“The foremost aim is protecting the public. This gamechanging technology will assist police to apprehend and prosecute offenders. There is officer review in each stage of the procedure and no further action would be taken without trained officers carefully reviewing the output.”