London Police facial recognition expansion casts wide net

London’s Metropolitan Police have a new community crime-fighting strategy that expands the use of facial recognition and other technologies to catch the city’s “most harmful offenders,” and apparently thieves on e-bikes.

Live facial recognition use will be expanded across all London boroughs. Pilots of operator-initiated facial recognition and cameras fixed to “street furniture” will continue. Retrospective facial recognition capabilities will “continue to grow,” but so will public engagement to build trust. First-responder drones will be deployed across the city for to rapidly reach incidents.

The Met says “officers will expand the use of technology and data to target London’s most harmful offenders” under the plan, which aligns with priorities at the national level.

But a rash of thefts involving people riding e-bikes and e-scooters has London residents “particularly concerned,” according to the announcement. The Independent reports these concerns are largely related to phone thefts.

Two accounts of operations to seize e-bikes and a quote on the Met’s crackdown on them and e-scooters follows.

Facial recognition “has many uses and it will pick up people that speed, so it will pick up people on e-bikes and in all sorts of situations,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley told The Independent.

Further details are offered in the “New Met for London Phase 2 2025-2028” plan, which extends the strategy of its 2023 predecessor. A new Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) will be launched around the beginning of 2027, in part to give Met Police instant identity verification capabilities through facial recognition and other biometrics.

High scale, low confidence

Home Office announced a plan to expand police use of facial recognition across the UK last week, as well as to consider making images from the national passport and driver’s license databases available to police.

There are already more than 19 million custody photos in the police national database (PND). Home Office licensed facial recognition software from Cognitec in 2020 for searches against the PND, but has never updated it.

Now the Guardian and Liberty Investigates have revealed that an NPL assessment commissioned by Home Office showed police officials potential problems with bias in the system in September, 2024.

The demographic differentials of facial recognition algorithms (including from Cognitec) as assessed by NIST were publicly available even before Home Office licensed the software, so any suggestion that they were previously unaware of the issue only introduces more questions.

In response to the NPL’s findings, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) ordered the confidence threshold for matches to be raised so that false matches would be filtered out, reducing bias, but police forces complained that the change led to too few leads. NPCC documents show potential matches fell from 56 percent of searches to 14 percent.

The NPCC said police found the change meant “a once effective tactic returned results of limited benefit.”

“Evidence is mounting as to why it is crucial we have robust safeguards in place before this powerful and intrusive technology is expanded any further,” says Liberty Policy and Campaigns Officer Charlie Whelton. “For too long, police forces have set the terms, and we are now seeing the real-life consequences.”

Article Topics

biometric bias  |  biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  live facial recognition  |  London Metropolitan Police  |  National Physical Laboratory  |  police  |  real-time biometrics  |  UK