UK Law Enforcement Agencies Campaign to Employ Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems

Police forces across the United Kingdom effectively campaigned to deploy a face scanning system acknowledged as biased against females, young people, and members of minority ethnic backgrounds, after complaining that a more accurate version produced a reduced number of potential suspects.

The Technology in Practice

British police use the national police database to carry out searches using historical face recognition. This procedure entails matching a reference photograph of a suspect against a repository of more than 19 million custody photos to find possible hits.

Admitted Bias

The Home Office conceded last week that the system was biased. This admission came after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and females at significantly higher rates than white men. The Home Office stated it “took steps on the findings”.

“This raises the issue of whether facial recognition only becomes effective if users accept discrimination in race and gender. Operational ease is a weak argument for overriding basic freedoms.”

Known Issue

Official papers show that this bias has been recognized for over twelve months. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an initial decision that was intended to address the problem.

Senior officers were informed of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The government-ordered laboratory study found the system was had a higher probability to produce incorrect matches for images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under.

A Reversed Decision

In response, the national police leadership body mandated that the confidence threshold required for potential matches be increased to a level where the bias was greatly diminished.

However, this decision was overturned the next month after forces complained that the adjusted system was producing fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents indicate the stricter setting cut the proportion of queries that yielded potential matches from over half to a mere under 15%.

Severe Disparities

Although the authorities refused to say what setting is currently used, the latest NPL study discovered the system could produce incorrect matches for Black women almost 100 times more often than for white women at certain settings.

The Home Office commented on these findings: “Our evaluation found that in a limited set of circumstances the software is has a greater tendency to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its match reports.”

Balancing Utility and Fairness

Describing the impact of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the police records note: “The change 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 documents further note that forces argued that “a once effective tactic now delivered results of questionable value”.

Broader Rollout Plans

Meanwhile, the UK administration has launched a ten-week public review on its proposals to expand the use of facial recognition technology. Policing minister Sarah Jones has labeled the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

Abimbola Johnson, head of the advisory panel for the national policing equality strategy, commented: “We observed very little discussion in race action plan meetings of the technology deployment despite clear relevance with the plan’s concerns.

“This disclosure demonstrate yet again that the pledges to combat discrimination the police has made via the race action plan are not being translated into wider practice. Our reports have cautioned that new technologies are being implemented in a landscape where ethnic inequalities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist.

“Any use of facial recognition must meet rigorous official guidelines, be independently scrutinised, and prove it reduces rather than compounds racial disparity.”

Home Office Response

A Home Office spokesperson stated: “We takes the conclusions of the report with utmost gravity and we have implemented changes. A new algorithm has been independently tested and procured, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be tested in the coming months and will be undergo further assessment.

“The foremost aim is protecting the public. This revolutionary tool will assist officers to apprehend and prosecute offenders. There is officer review in each stage of the process and no further action would be pursued without specialist personnel meticulously examining the output.”