Met Police to double facial recognition use amid budget cuts

Ongoing concerns

While the Met maintains that its deployments are intelligence-led and focus exclusively on locating individuals wanted for serious crimes, senior officers previously admitted to a Lords committee in December 2023 that the force selects images for its watchlist based on crime categories attached to people’s photos, rather than a context-specific assessment of the threat presented by a given individual.

This includes those wanted for non-serious crimes such as shoplifting or traffic offences.

Academic Karen Yeung, an interdisciplinary professorial fellow in law, ethics and informatics at Birmingham Law School, challenged the proportionality and necessity of this approach during the same Lords session, claiming the coercive power of the state means police must be able to justify each entry to the watchlists based on the specific circumstances involved, rather than their blanket inclusion via “crime types”.

Critics have also raised concerns about the Met’s disproportionate use of LFR, in terms of watchlist sizes, faces scanned, and impacts on certain communities.

Civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, for example, has repeatedly highlighted how the size of the Met’s LFR watchlist – which is now routinely exceeding 15,000 faces – indicates the deployments are not intelligence-led or targeted.

Commenting in the wake of a February 2022 LFR deployment in Westminster, where the watchlist contained 9,756 images, Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo told Computer Weekly, “That’s not a targeted and specified deployment because of a pressing need – it’s a catch net.”

According to data gathered by Green Party London Assembly member Zoë Garbett, over half of the Met’s 180 LFR deployments that took place during 2024 were also in areas where the proportion of Black residents is higher than the city’s average, including Lewisham and Haringey.

While Black people comprise 13.5% of London’s total population, the proportion is much higher in the Met’s deployment areas, with Black people making up 36% of the Haringey population, 34% of the Lewisham population, and 40.1% of the Croydon population, where the Met is also planning to deploy permanent LFR cameras.

Garbett added that while nearly two million people in total had their faces scanned across the Met’s 2024 deployments, only 804 arrests were made – a rate of just 0.04%.

The Met said in July this year that since the start of 2024, more than 1,000 arrests have been made using LFR, 773 of which led to the individual being charged or cautioned.

Similarly, while the Met claims its use of the technology is supported by the majority of the public, there have been instances where it has deployed LFR despite public opposition.

In December 2024, for example, Computer Weekly revealed that, contrary to the force’s claim its LFR deployments in Lewisham are supported by the majority of residents and local councillors, there was minimal direct consultation with residents, while councillors clearly continued to express concerns about it.

“What people support is safer streets and improved equity and community cohesion,” Green Lewisham councillor Hau-Yu Tam told Computer Weekly at the time. “They don’t necessarily support live facial recognition, which they’re not given the full rundown of, or they’re given very misleading information about.”

In January 2023, Newham Council also unanimously passed a motion to suspend the use of LFR throughout the borough until biometric and anti-discrimination safeguards are in place.

While the motion highlighted the potential of LFR to “exacerbate racist outcomes in policing” – particularly in Newham, the most ethnically diverse of all local authorities in England and Wales – both the Met and the Home Office said that they would press forward with the deployments anyway.