Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor Sadiq Khan but branded “alarming” by opponents.
The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. He was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.
The move by the UK’s largest force will extend the spread of face scanning in policing which has already been deployed with cameras on vans and in fixed locations including in Croydon, Manchester and South Wales. Retrospective facial recognition systems are also widely in use across the UK.
This week the Guardian revealed how police arrested a man for a burglary in a city 100 miles away that he had never visited after software confused him with another person of south Asian heritage. It also emerged the Met has signed a £490,000 three-month contract with the controversial US AI firm Palantir to try to detect rogue officers based on their wider conduct.
Zoë Garbett, the Green party London Assembly member whose question triggered Khan’s announcement, called the Met’s latest tech pilot “an alarming change”.
“It’s a new technique, and it really changes the relationship with the public,” she told Khan during a City Hall meeting on Thursday. “They’re going to be able to literally walk up and scan people’s faces on the device.”
Khan denied this and said it would be used during police stops and when officers were not persuaded a member of the public had identified themselves correctly.
“The only alternative the police have is to arrest that person and take them to the police station,” he said. “So one of the advantages of this device … is to avoid that huge inconvenience and to see if the person they are speaking to is somebody whose face matches with somebody whose face they’ve got on the 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. Sarah Jones, the policing minister, has called the technology “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching”.
But the chair of the equalities watchdog, Mary Ann Stephenson, said: “There is a danger that these technologies can be inaccurate and falsely identify people. The data shows that there are racial disparities for false positive identification, causing human rights infringements and distress to those affected. That is why a strong legal framework is needed.”
Operator-initiated facial…
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