Metropolitan Police officers will begin scanning the faces of citizens using automatic facial recognition technology to check their identities, a move backed by the Mayor of London but described as “dangerous” by opponents.
The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Sadiq Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – which is typically deployed on smartphones – for six months. The mayor was responding to a question from an opposition politician amid growing concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states that it “does not currently use so-called operator-initiated facial recognition”.
Facial scanning has already been deployed by police in vans and with cameras at fixed locations including Croydon, Manchester and South Wales. Retroactive facial recognition systems are also in widespread use across the UK.
This week the Guardian revealed how police arrested a man accused of burglary in a town 100 miles away he had never visited because software had confused him with another man of South Asian heritage. It also emerged that the Met signed a three-month contract worth £490,000 with controversial US AI firm Palantir to hunt down rogue officers based on their wide-ranging conduct.
Green Party London Assembly member Zoë Garbett, whose questioning led to Khan’s announcement, called the Met’s latest technology pilot “a dangerous change”.
“This is a new technology and it really changes the relationship with the public,” he told Khan during a meeting at City Hall on Thursday. “They’re going to be able to literally walk up and scan people’s faces onto the device.”
Khan denied this and said it would be used during a police stop and that a member of the public had correctly identified himself when officers were not persuaded.
“The only option the police have is to arrest the person and take him to the police station,” he said. “So one of the benefits of this tool … is to avoid that enormous inconvenience and see that the person they’re talking to is someone whose face matches someone whose face is in their custody record.”
The pilot emerged as the Equality and Human Rights Commission called for a new independent oversight body to regulate the use of facial recognition technology in the UK. Police Minister Sarah Jones has called the technology “the biggest breakthrough in catching criminals since DNA matching”.
But Mary-Ann Stephenson, chair of the equality watchdog, said: “There is a risk that these technologies could be inaccurate and misidentify people. The data shows that there are racial disparities in false positive identification, leading to human rights violations and distress to those affected. That’s why a stronger legal framework is needed.”
Operator-introduced facial recognition is already in use by South Wales Police, where officers run NEC’s NeoFace algorithms on their smartphones. They can use it to “confirm the identity of an unknown person they suspect is missing, at imminent risk of serious harm or is wanted, in circumstances where they are unable to provide details, refuse to provide details or provide incorrect details”, the force says.
It can also be used to identify dead or unconscious people but cannot be used covertly. one more police definition says it can be used when “there is intelligence to suggest they may be at risk of harming themselves or others”. The civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch has described it as “vague” and offering “huge scope” for using the technology in non-crime situations.
“It’s shocking that I have to force the mayor to disclose that he is pursuing operator-introduced facial recognition technology,” Garbett said. “We already have no clear legal framework for live facial recognition and now this is being extended further with handheld devices that allow officers to sniff and scan people’s faces. In the UK, no one has to reveal their identity to the police without a good reason and this unregulated technology threatens that fundamental right.”
In March 2024, Khan told the London Assembly: “If the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) were to use operator-initiated facial recognition, I would expect the MPS to consult stakeholders, including the London Policing Ethics Panel, as well as carefully consider the legal, policy, community, data protection and ethical implications.”
In December Jones launched a 10-week consultation on facial recognition technology, saying: “It has already helped to remove thousands of dangerous criminals from our streets and it has huge potential to strengthen how the police keep us safe. We will expand its use so forces can put more criminals behind bars and tackle crime in their communities.”
The Met said more than 100 wanted criminals were arrested in the first three months of the Croydon Live facial recognition pilot, when cameras were installed on lamp-posts.
