Police forces across the UK successfully lobbied to deploy a facial recognition system known to be biased against females, young people, and members of minority ethnic backgrounds, following complaints that a more accurate version produced a reduced number of potential suspects.
How the System Works
UK forces utilize the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This process involves matching a reference photograph of a person of interest against a database of over 19 million custody photos to find possible hits.
Acknowledged Discrimination
The Home Office admitted last week that the system was flawed. This admission followed a study by the government's National Physical Laboratory determined it incorrectly matched Black and Asian people and women at much greater frequency than white men. The ministry stated it “had acted on the findings”.
“This raises the question of whether this technology only becomes effective if users tolerate discrimination in ethnicity and gender. Operational ease is a weak argument for disregarding basic freedoms.”
Known Issue
Internal documents reveal that this discriminatory flaw has been recognized for over twelve months. Furthermore, law enforcement argued to overturn an earlier ruling that was designed to address the problem.
Senior officers were informed of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The government-ordered laboratory study found the system was had a higher probability to produce false positives for photos of women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under.
A Reversed Decision
In response, the national police leadership body ordered that the confidence threshold required for potential matches be increased to a level where the disparity was greatly diminished.
However, this directive was reversed the following month after forces complained that the adjusted system was generating fewer “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents indicate the stricter setting cut the number of queries resulting in possible identifications from over half to a just under 15%.
Severe Disparities
Although the Home Office and NPCC refused to say what setting is now in operation, the latest independent review discovered the system could produce false positives for women of Black heritage almost 100 times more frequently than for Caucasian women at specific configurations.
The Home Office commented on these findings: “The testing found that in a limited set of circumstances the software is more likely to wrongly flag some population segments in its search results.”
Balancing Utility and Fairness
Describing the impact of the temporary raise to the system's accuracy setting, the police records state: “This adjustment greatly lessens the impact of bias across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, generation and gender but had a substantially detrimental effect on police efficiency”. The documents add that forces argued that “a once effective tactic returned outcomes of questionable value”.
Wider Implementation Proposals
Meanwhile, the UK administration has launched a ten-week public review on its proposals to expand the use of facial recognition technology. The minister for police the relevant minister 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 advisory panel for the police race action plan, said: “There was scant consideration through race action plan meetings of the facial recognition rollout despite clear relevance with the plan’s concerns.
“These revelations 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 warned that innovative tools are being rolled out in a landscape where racial disparities, weak scrutiny and poor data collection continue to exist.
“All deployment of this technology must adhere to rigorous official guidelines, be independently scrutinised, and prove it reduces rather than compounds ethnic bias.”
Official Statement
A government representative said: “We treat the conclusions of the report seriously and we have implemented changes. A updated software 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.
“The foremost aim is protecting the public. This gamechanging technology will support officers to apprehend and prosecute offenders. There is human involvement in every step of the process and no further action would be taken without trained officers carefully reviewing the output.”
