Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.
Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with the Guardian by Liberty Investigates.
But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.
“I was very angry, because the kid looked about 10 years younger than me,” said Choudhury, who wears a beard. “Everything was different. Skin was lighter. Suspect looked 18 years old. His nose was bigger. He had no facial hair. His eyes were different. His lips were smaller than mine.
“I just assumed that the investigative officer saw that I was a brown person with curly hair and decided to arrest me.”
UK police forces use an algorithm procured by the Home Office from Cognitec, a German company. It runs about 25,000 monthly searches against around 19m police mugshots held on the UK-wide police national database. Facial matches should be treated as intelligence, not fact, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Thames Valley police said the decision to arrest Choudhury was made after a human visual assessment as well.
But the technology was revealed in December to produce a far higher rate of false positives for black (5.5 %) and Asian (4.0 %) faces than for white faces (0.04 %) at certain settings, according to Home Office commissioned research. Police and crime commissioners warned of “concerning in-built bias”, and said that while “there is no evidence of adverse impact in any individual case, that is more by luck than design”.
Since December, Thames Valley police has also been deploying live facial recognition technology to scan the public in locations in Oxford, Slough, Reading, Wycombe and Milton Keynes. It has captured about 100,000 faces, leading to six arrests.
Given the differences between the man on the CCTV and his own face, Choudhury assumed he would be quickly freed. He offered evidence of work meetings in Southampton on the day of the crime but he was instead taken into custody.
Choudhury is claiming damages against Thames Valley police and Hampshire constabulary, which executed his arrest. His neighbours saw him being led away in handcuffs, his father was very anxious about him being held and he was unable to work the following day, he said. He is also calling for greater transparency about the number of wrongful arrests involving facial recognition technology.
Choudhury’s mugshot was…
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