UK Police Forces Lobbied to Use Biased Facial Recognition Technology

Police forces across the United Kingdom successfully lobbied to deploy a face scanning system acknowledged as discriminatory against women, youths, and individuals from minority ethnic backgrounds, following complaints that a more accurate version generated fewer investigative leads.

How the System Works

UK forces utilize the national police database to carry out retrospective facial recognition searches. This procedure involves matching a “probe image” of a suspect against a repository of more than 19 million custody photos to find possible hits.

Acknowledged Discrimination

The UK interior ministry admitted last week that the system was flawed. This admission followed a study by the government's National Physical Laboratory found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than Caucasian males. The ministry said it “took steps on the findings”.

“It prompts the question of whether facial recognition only becomes effective if users tolerate discrimination in race and gender. Convenience is a weak argument for overriding fundamental rights.”

Long-Standing Problem

Internal documents show that this bias has been known about for more than a year. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an initial decision that was designed to address the problem.

Senior officers were notified of the system's bias in late 2024. The Home Office-commissioned NPL review found the system was had a higher probability to produce false positives for images depicting women, individuals of Black ethnicity, and those aged 40 and under.

A Policy U-Turn

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

However, this directive was overturned the following month following complaints from police that the modified technology was generating fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. Internal records indicate the stricter setting reduced the proportion of searches that yielded potential matches from over half to a mere 14%.

Profound Inequalities

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

The Home Office stated on these findings: “Our evaluation found that in a specific scenarios the algorithm is has a greater tendency to wrongly flag some population segments in its search results.”

Balancing Utility and Fairness

Describing the impact of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the police records state: “This adjustment significantly reduces the impact of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, age and gender but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The papers add that forces argued that “a once effective tactic returned outcomes of questionable value”.

Broader Rollout Plans

Meanwhile, the government has launched a ten-week consultation on its proposals to expand the use of facial recognition technology. Policing minister the relevant minister has labeled the tool as the “biggest breakthrough since genetic fingerprinting”.

Expert and Oversight Concerns

Abimbola Johnson, chair of the advisory panel for the police race action plan, said: “We observed scant consideration through equality strategy sessions of the technology deployment despite obvious cross-over with the plan’s concerns.

“This disclosure show once again that the anti-racism commitments the police has made through the equality initiative are not being translated into broader operations. Our reports have cautioned that new technologies are being rolled out in a context where racial disparities, weak scrutiny and faulty information gathering already persist.

“All deployment of this technology must meet rigorous official guidelines, be subject to external review, and demonstrate it reduces rather than compounds ethnic bias.”

Home Office Response

A Home Office spokesperson stated: “We treat the findings of the report with utmost gravity and we have implemented changes. A updated software has been independently tested and acquired, which has no statistically significant bias. It will be trialled early next year and will be subject to evaluation.

“Our priority is ensuring public safety. This gamechanging technology will assist officers to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in every step of the procedure and no arrest or charge would be taken without trained officers meticulously examining the results.”