🔗 Share this article British Police Forces Campaign to Employ Biased Face Scanning Systems Law enforcement agencies across the UK successfully lobbied to deploy a facial recognition system acknowledged as biased against women, young people, and individuals from ethnic minority groups, following complaints that a less biased version produced a reduced number of investigative leads. The Technology in Practice UK forces utilize the national police database to conduct searches using historical face recognition. This procedure involves comparing a reference photograph of a person of interest against a database of more than 19 million mugshots to identify possible hits. Admitted Bias 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 people of Black and Asian heritage and women at significantly higher rates than white men. The Home Office stated it “took steps on the findings”. “It prompts the question of whether facial recognition only becomes useful if users tolerate discrimination in ethnicity and gender. Operational ease is a weak argument for disregarding basic freedoms.” Known Issue Official papers reveal that this bias has been known about for over twelve months. Furthermore, police forces lobbied to reverse an earlier ruling that was designed to mitigate the problem. Police bosses were informed of the algorithmic discrimination in late 2024. The government-ordered NPL review found the system was had a higher probability to produce false positives for images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under. A Policy U-Turn In response, the national police leadership body mandated that the confidence threshold required for potential matches be increased to a level where the disparity was greatly diminished. However, this decision was overturned the following month following complaints from police that the modified technology was producing a lower number of “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents show the higher threshold reduced the proportion of queries resulting in possible identifications from 56% to a just under 15%. Severe Disparities Although the authorities refused to say what threshold is now in operation, the recent independent review found the system could produce incorrect matches for women of Black heritage almost 100 times more frequently than for Caucasian women at certain settings. The Home Office stated on these results: “Our evaluation identified that in a specific scenarios the software is more likely to wrongly flag some demographic groups in its match reports.” Balancing Utility and Fairness Describing the impact of the brief increase to the system's accuracy setting, the NPCC documents state: “This adjustment greatly lessens the impact of discrimination across legally safeguarded attributes of race, age and gender but had a significant negative impact on police efficiency”. The papers further note that forces argued that “a previously useful tool now delivered results of questionable value”. Broader Rollout Plans Meanwhile, the UK administration has launched a two-and-a-half-month public review on its proposals to widen the use of facial recognition technology. Policing minister the relevant minister has labeled the tool as the “most significant advance since DNA matching”. Expert and Oversight Concerns The chair of a police oversight board, head of the advisory panel for the national policing equality strategy, said: “We observed scant discussion in race action plan meetings of the technology deployment even with obvious cross-over with the strategy's goals. “This disclosure show yet again that the anti-racism commitments the police has undertaken through the race action plan are not being translated into wider practice. Our reports have warned that innovative tools are being implemented in a landscape where ethnic inequalities, inadequate oversight and poor data collection continue to exist. “Any use of this technology must meet strict national standards, be independently scrutinised, and prove it diminishes rather than compounds racial disparity.” Home Office Response A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office takes the conclusions of the study seriously and we have implemented changes. A new algorithm has been externally evaluated 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 revolutionary tool will assist officers to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in every step of the procedure and no further action would be taken without trained officers carefully reviewing the results.”