London police can use live facial recognition 10 times a week under new rules

London’s Metropolitan Police, or The Met, is ramping up its use of live facial recognition in tandem with a strategy that sees it “ruthlessly prioritizing resources and putting more officers on the beat in the busiest parts of London,” according to a news release.

The Met says the “intensified action” is part of a plan developed with the Mayor of London to “boost local neighbourhood teams, enhance partnership working and put high visibility policing at the heart of fighting crime and rebuilding trust.” The harder truth is that it is a response to a 260 million pound (about 43 million dollar) budget shortfall and a significant reduction in staff.

Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley says The Met is getting “smaller but more capable.” Part of that capability is doubling the use of live facial recognition. Buried in the release is the notice that The Met is “scaling up our use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) more widely supported by additional officers and staff.”

“Currently LFR is used four times a week across two days, but this will increase up to five days a week, delivering up to 10 deployments a week across London to drive up arrests of wanted offenders.”

FRT to target sex offenders, political protests: Met commish

A report in The Guardian notes that the Met has to date made 1,000 arrests using live facial recognition, 773 of which have led to a charge or caution. Commissioner Rowley says the force is only interested in using it to find “serious offenders like wanted offenders and registered sex offenders.”

“We routinely put it out there and capture multiple serious offenders in one go, many of whom have committed serious offences against women or children, or people who are wanted for armed robbery.” He calls live FRT “a fantastic piece of technology” that is “very responsibly used.”

Retailers have been sounding alarms over crime in London’s West End, which has seen a rise in shoplifting, with cases topping 500,000 in 2024. Other issues of concern include phone snatching and knife crime. A new report shows that 20 streets around Oxford Circus and Regent Street accounted for one in every 15 knife attacks between 2021 and 2024.

That said, Rowley also notes in the Independent that protests related to Israel and Palestine and climate change have increased. “We don’t have any powers that are there to reduce the number of protests, to cancel them,” the police commissioner says. “Laws are very permissive and encouraging of protests, which is entirely understandable, and I’ve got no objection to that, but what we’ve seen, unfortunately, is a proportion of those create crime and offences.”

Croydon to get first permanent live FRT deployment

In light of this and other concerns, the doubling of live facial recognition usage to drive up arrests is not sitting well with some, who see the general increase in police use of facial recognition as a troubling trend.

A piece in Metro UK notes that the district of Croydon, which in 2024 recorded 10,000 violent crimes in a 12-month period, is about to get the UK’s first permanent live facial recognition deployment via cameras attached to lampposts or buildings in pedestrian areas.

The organization Big Brother Watch says police are “off the leash” in using live FRT, in that there is no existing legislation to cover the use of the controversial biometric technology. Police forces scanned nearly 4.7 million faces with live facial recognition last year, more than double it scanned in 2023.

Per the Guardian, “forces almost doubled the number of retrospective facial recognition searches made last year using the police national database (PND) from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798.”

“The PND contains custody mugshots, millions of which have been found to be stored unlawfully, of people who have never been charged with or convicted of an offence.”

The Home Office has also reportedly been working with the police on a new national facial recognition system, known as “strategic facial matcher,” intended to search databases including custody images and immigration records.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  live facial recognition  |  London Metropolitan Police  |  police  |  real-time biometrics