🔗 Share this article British Police Forces Campaign to Employ Discriminatory Facial Recognition Systems Police forces across the United Kingdom effectively campaigned to use a face scanning system acknowledged as biased against women, youths, and individuals from minority ethnic backgrounds, following complaints that a more accurate version generated a reduced number of potential suspects. The Technology in Practice UK forces use the police national database (PND) to carry out searches using historical face recognition. This process involves matching a reference photograph of a person of interest against a repository of over 19 million mugshots to find possible hits. Acknowledged Discrimination The Home Office conceded last week that the system was flawed. This admission came after a study by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at much greater frequency than Caucasian males. The Home Office said it “had acted on the findings”. “This raises the issue of whether facial recognition only becomes effective if users tolerate discrimination in race and gender. Convenience is a poor argument for overriding basic freedoms.” Known Issue Internal documents reveal that this bias has been recognized for over twelve months. Furthermore, law enforcement lobbied to reverse an earlier ruling that was intended to mitigate the problem. Senior officers were notified of the system's bias in September 2024. The Home Office-commissioned laboratory study found the system was more likely to produce incorrect matches for images depicting females, Black people, and those aged 40 and under. A Reversed Decision In response, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) mandated that the confidence threshold required for potential matches be raised to a point where the disparity was significantly reduced. However, this directive was reversed the following month following complaints from police that the modified technology was producing fewer “investigative leads”. NPCC documents show the stricter setting reduced the number of queries that yielded potential matches from over half to a just under 15%. Profound Inequalities Although the Home Office and NPCC declined to specify what threshold is now in operation, the recent NPL study found the system could generate incorrect matches for Black women almost 100 times more frequently than for Caucasian women at specific configurations. The ministry stated on these results: “The testing found that in a specific scenarios the software is more likely to incorrectly include some population segments in its search results.” Balancing Utility and Fairness Outlining the impact of the brief increase to the system's confidence threshold, the police records state: “The change greatly lessens the effect of discrimination across protected characteristics of ethnicity, generation and sex but had a substantially detrimental effect on operational effectiveness”. The papers further note that forces argued that “a previously useful tool now delivered results of questionable value”. Wider Implementation Proposals Meanwhile, the government has opened a two-and-a-half-month consultation on its plans to expand the use of biometric scanning systems. Policing minister the relevant minister has labeled the tool as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”. Expert and Oversight Concerns Abimbola Johnson, head of the advisory panel for the police race action plan, said: “There was scant discussion in equality strategy sessions of the facial recognition rollout despite clear relevance with the plan’s concerns. “This disclosure demonstrate once again that the anti-racism commitments policing has made through the equality initiative are failing to be integrated into broader operations. Our reports have warned that new technologies are being rolled out in a context where ethnic inequalities, weak scrutiny and faulty information gathering continue to exist. “Any use of facial recognition must adhere to strict national standards, be independently scrutinised, and demonstrate it diminishes rather than compounds ethnic bias.” Official Statement A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office treat the conclusions of the study seriously and we have already taken action. A updated software has been externally evaluated and acquired, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be trialled in the coming months and will be undergo further assessment. “Our priority is protecting the public. This revolutionary tool will assist 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.”