🔗 Share this article

Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to deploy a face scanning system acknowledged as discriminatory against women, youths, and members of ethnic minority groups, following complaints that a more accurate version generated fewer potential suspects.

The Technology in Practice

British police utilize the national police database to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches. This process entails matching a reference photograph of a person of interest against a repository of more than 19 million mugshots to identify possible hits.

Acknowledged Discrimination

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

“This raises the question of whether this technology only becomes effective if users accept discrimination in race and gender. Convenience is a weak argument for disregarding basic freedoms.”

Long-Standing Problem

Official papers show that this bias has been known about for more than a year. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an earlier ruling that was designed to address the problem.

Police bosses were notified of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The government-ordered laboratory study concluded the system was had a higher probability to produce incorrect matches for photos of females, Black people, and those aged 40 and under.

A Policy U-Turn

In reaction, the national police leadership body mandated that the confidence threshold required for possible hits be raised to a level where the disparity was greatly diminished.

However, this directive was overturned the next month after forces complained that the adjusted system was generating fewer “investigative leads”. Internal records indicate the stricter setting cut the number of queries that yielded possible identifications from over half to a just 14%.

Severe Disparities

Although the authorities refused to say what setting is now in operation, the recent NPL study discovered the system could produce false positives for women of Black heritage nearly a hundred times more often than for white women at certain settings.

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

Operational Effectiveness vs. Bias

Describing the effect of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the NPCC documents note: “This adjustment significantly reduces the impact of bias across protected characteristics of race, age and sex but had a significant negative impact on police efficiency”. The documents add that police units complained that “a once effective tactic 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 facial recognition technology. Policing minister Sarah Jones has labeled the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

The chair of a police oversight board, head of the independent scrutiny and oversight board for the police race action plan, commented: “We observed scant consideration through race action plan meetings of the technology deployment even with obvious cross-over with the strategy's goals.

“This disclosure demonstrate yet again that the anti-racism commitments the police has undertaken via the equality initiative are not being translated into broader operations. Independent assessments have cautioned that innovative tools are being rolled out in a landscape where ethnic inequalities, weak scrutiny and faulty information gathering continue to exist.

“Any use of this technology must adhere to strict national standards, be subject to external review, and prove it reduces rather than exacerbates racial disparity.”

Official Statement

A government representative stated: “The Home Office takes the findings of the report with utmost gravity and we have implemented changes. A new algorithm has been externally evaluated and acquired, which has no statistically significant bias. It will be tested early next year and will be subject to further assessment.

“The foremost aim is ensuring public safety. This gamechanging technology will assist officers to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in each stage of the process and no further action would be pursued without specialist personnel carefully reviewing the results.”