UK Police Forces Lobbied to Employ Discriminatory Facial Recognition Technology

Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to deploy a facial recognition system acknowledged as biased against women, youths, and members of minority ethnic backgrounds, following complaints that a more accurate version produced fewer investigative leads.

How the System Works

British police use the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This procedure involves matching a “probe image” of a suspect against a database of over 19 million mugshots to find possible hits.

Admitted Bias

The UK interior ministry admitted last week that the technology was flawed. This acknowledgment followed a review by the government's National Physical Laboratory found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men. The ministry stated it “took steps on the findings”.

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

Known Issue

Internal documents show that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for over twelve months. Furthermore, law enforcement lobbied to reverse an initial decision that was intended to address the problem.

Police bosses were notified of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The government-ordered NPL review concluded the system was more likely 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 raised to a level where the bias was greatly diminished.

However, this decision was overturned the next month following complaints from police that the adjusted system was producing a lower number of “investigative leads”. NPCC documents show the stricter setting reduced the number of queries that yielded possible identifications from 56% to a mere under 15%.

Profound Inequalities

Although the authorities refused to say what setting is now in operation, the recent independent review found the system could generate incorrect matches for Black women almost 100 times more frequently than for white women at specific configurations.

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

Balancing Utility and Fairness

Outlining the impact of the temporary raise to the system's accuracy setting, the NPCC documents note: “This adjustment significantly reduces the impact of discrimination across protected characteristics of ethnicity, age and sex but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The documents further note that forces complained that “a previously useful tool now delivered outcomes of questionable value”.

Wider Implementation Proposals

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

Expert and Oversight Concerns

Abimbola Johnson, head 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 clear relevance with the plan’s concerns.

“These revelations demonstrate once again that the pledges to combat discrimination the police has made through the equality initiative are not being translated into broader operations. Independent assessments have cautioned that innovative tools are being implemented in a context where racial disparities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist.

“Any use of this technology must adhere to strict national standards, be subject to external review, and demonstrate it reduces rather than compounds ethnic bias.”

Home Office Response

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We takes the conclusions of the study 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 evaluation.

“Our priority is protecting the public. This revolutionary tool will support police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is officer review in every step of the process and no arrest or charge would be pursued without trained officers carefully reviewing the output.”