🔗 Share this article British Law Enforcement Agencies Campaign to Use Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems Police forces across the United Kingdom successfully lobbied to use a face scanning system acknowledged as biased against women, young people, and members of minority ethnic backgrounds, after complaining that a more accurate version generated a reduced number of investigative leads. How the System Works UK forces utilize the police national database (PND) to carry out searches using historical face recognition. This procedure involves matching a “probe image” of a person of interest against a database of more than 19 million custody photos to identify possible hits. Admitted Bias The UK interior ministry conceded last week that the system was flawed. This admission came after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it incorrectly matched people of Black and Asian heritage and females at significantly higher rates than white men. The ministry said it “had acted on the findings”. “It prompts the issue of whether this technology only becomes useful if users accept biases in ethnicity and sex. Operational ease is a poor argument for disregarding fundamental rights.” Known Issue Internal documents reveal that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for more than a year. Furthermore, police forces argued to overturn an earlier ruling that was intended to mitigate the problem. Senior officers were informed of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The Home Office-commissioned laboratory study found the system was more likely to suggest false positives for images depicting females, Black people, and those aged 40 and under. A Policy U-Turn In reaction, the national police leadership body mandated that the accuracy setting required for possible hits be raised to a level where the bias was significantly reduced. However, this decision was reversed the following month after forces complained that the modified technology was generating a lower number of “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents show the higher threshold cut the number of queries resulting in potential matches from 56% to a just 14%. Profound Inequalities Although the Home Office and NPCC declined to specify what setting is currently used, the recent NPL study found the system could produce incorrect matches for Black women nearly a hundred times more frequently than for Caucasian women at specific configurations. The ministry commented on these results: “The testing found that in a limited set of circumstances the algorithm is more likely to wrongly flag some population segments in its search results.” Balancing Utility and Fairness Describing the effect of the brief increase to the system's confidence threshold, the police records state: “This adjustment significantly reduces the effect of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of race, age and sex but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The documents add that forces complained that “a once effective tactic returned results of limited benefit”. Wider Implementation Proposals Meanwhile, the government has launched a two-and-a-half-month consultation on its plans to widen the use of facial recognition technology. The minister for police the relevant minister has described the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since genetic fingerprinting”. Expert and Oversight Concerns Abimbola Johnson, head of the advisory panel for the police race action plan, commented: “There was scant consideration in equality strategy sessions of the technology deployment despite clear relevance with the strategy's goals. “This disclosure demonstrate once again that the pledges to combat discrimination the police has undertaken through the race action plan are failing to be integrated into broader operations. Independent assessments have cautioned that new technologies are being implemented in a context where racial disparities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist. “Any use of this technology must meet rigorous official guidelines, be subject to external review, and prove it reduces rather than exacerbates ethnic bias.” Home Office Response A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office takes the conclusions of the report with utmost gravity and we have implemented changes. A new algorithm has been externally evaluated and procured, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be trialled early next year and will be undergo evaluation. “Our priority is ensuring public safety. This gamechanging technology will support police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in each stage of the process and no arrest or charge would be taken without trained officers carefully reviewing the output.”