🔗 Share this article UK Law Enforcement Agencies Lobbied to Employ Discriminatory Face Scanning Systems Police forces across the United Kingdom successfully lobbied to deploy a face scanning system acknowledged as discriminatory against females, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that a less biased version generated a reduced number of potential suspects. The Technology in Practice British police utilize the national police database to carry out retrospective facial recognition searches. This process entails matching a “probe image” of a suspect against a repository of over 19 million mugshots to identify possible hits. Admitted Bias The Home Office admitted last week that the system was flawed. This acknowledgment came after a review by the government's National Physical Laboratory found it misidentified Black and Asian people and females at much greater frequency than Caucasian males. The Home Office stated it “had acted on the findings”. “This raises the question of whether this technology only becomes useful if users accept discrimination in race and sex. Operational ease is a weak argument for overriding basic freedoms.” Known Issue Official papers reveal that this bias has been recognized for more than a year. Furthermore, law enforcement argued to overturn an initial decision that was designed to address the problem. Senior officers were informed of the algorithmic discrimination in September 2024. The Home Office-commissioned NPL review concluded the system was more likely to produce false positives for photos of women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under. A Reversed Decision In response, the national police leadership body ordered that the confidence threshold required for potential matches be increased to a point where the bias was significantly reduced. However, this directive was reversed the following month following complaints from police that the adjusted system was producing a lower number of “useful lines of inquiry”. NPCC documents show the higher threshold cut the number of queries that yielded possible identifications from over half to a just under 15%. Severe Disparities Although the Home Office and NPCC refused to say what threshold is now in operation, the recent NPL study discovered the system could produce false positives for women of Black heritage almost 100 times more often than for white women at specific configurations. The ministry stated on these results: “The testing identified that in a limited set of circumstances the algorithm is has a greater tendency to wrongly flag some demographic groups in its match reports.” Balancing Utility and Fairness Outlining the impact of the temporary raise to the system's confidence threshold, the police records state: “The change significantly reduces the effect of discrimination across legally safeguarded attributes of ethnicity, generation and gender but had a substantially detrimental effect on operational effectiveness”. The documents add that forces argued that “a previously useful tool returned outcomes of questionable value”. Wider Implementation Proposals Meanwhile, the government has launched a two-and-a-half-month consultation on its plans to widen the use of biometric scanning systems. Policing minister Sarah Jones has described the technology as the “most significant advance since DNA matching”. Criticism from Advisors and Monitors The chair of a police oversight board, head of the advisory panel for the national policing equality strategy, said: “We observed scant consideration in race action plan meetings of the facial recognition rollout even with clear relevance with the strategy's goals. “This disclosure demonstrate yet again that the anti-racism commitments policing has undertaken through the equality initiative are failing to be integrated into broader operations. Independent assessments have cautioned that new technologies are being rolled out in a landscape where ethnic inequalities, inadequate oversight and faulty information gathering continue to exist. “Any use of facial recognition must adhere to rigorous official guidelines, be subject to external review, and prove it reduces rather than compounds ethnic bias.” Home Office Response A government representative stated: “We takes the conclusions of the study seriously and we have already taken action. A updated software has been externally evaluated and acquired, which has demonstrated no measurable discrimination. It will be trialled early next year and will be undergo further assessment. “Our priority is ensuring public safety. This gamechanging technology will support police to put criminals and rapists behind bars. There is human involvement in every step of the process and no further action would be pursued without trained officers meticulously examining the results.”