🔗 Share this article British Police Forces Campaign to Use Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system acknowledged as discriminatory against females, youths, and individuals from minority ethnic backgrounds, after complaining that a less biased version produced fewer investigative leads. How the System Works UK forces utilize the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This process entails comparing a “probe image” of a person of interest against a repository of more than 19 million mugshots to identify possible hits. Acknowledged Discrimination The UK interior ministry conceded last week that the system was flawed. This acknowledgment came after a study by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men. The Home Office said it “had acted on the findings”. “This raises the issue of whether facial recognition only becomes useful if users tolerate discrimination in ethnicity and gender. Operational ease is a weak argument for overriding fundamental rights.” Long-Standing Problem Internal documents show that this discriminatory flaw has been known about for over twelve months. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an earlier ruling that was intended to address the problem. Senior officers were notified of the system's bias in September 2024. The government-ordered NPL review found the system was more likely to suggest false positives for photos of females, Black people, and those under 40 years old. A Policy U-Turn In reaction, the national police leadership body ordered that the confidence threshold required for possible hits be increased to a level where the disparity was significantly reduced. However, this directive was reversed the next month after forces complained that the adjusted system was generating fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents show the stricter setting reduced the number of searches resulting in potential matches from over half to a just 14%. Profound Inequalities Although the Home Office and NPCC declined to specify what setting is now in operation, the recent independent review found the system could produce incorrect matches for Black women almost 100 times more frequently than for Caucasian women at specific configurations. The Home Office commented on these results: “Our evaluation identified that in a specific scenarios the algorithm is has a greater tendency to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its match reports.” Balancing Utility and Fairness Describing the effect of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the NPCC documents note: “The change greatly lessens the impact of discrimination across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, age and gender but had a significant negative impact on operational effectiveness”. The documents further note that police units argued that “a once effective tactic now delivered outcomes of questionable value”. Wider Implementation Proposals Meanwhile, the UK administration has opened a two-and-a-half-month consultation on its proposals to widen the use of facial recognition technology. The minister for police the relevant minister has described 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: “There was very little discussion in equality strategy sessions of the facial recognition rollout despite clear relevance with the strategy's goals. “These revelations demonstrate once again that the pledges to combat discrimination policing has undertaken via the equality initiative are not being translated into broader operations. Our reports have cautioned that new technologies are being rolled out in a landscape where racial disparities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist. “Any use of this technology must meet rigorous official guidelines, be independently scrutinised, and demonstrate it diminishes rather than exacerbates ethnic bias.” Home Office Response A Home Office spokesperson stated: “The Home Office treat the findings of the report seriously and we have implemented changes. A new algorithm has been independently tested and acquired, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be tested in the coming months and will be subject to further assessment. “Our priority is protecting the public. This gamechanging technology will support police to apprehend and prosecute offenders. There is human involvement in every step of the process and no further action would be pursued without specialist personnel meticulously examining the results.”