Met claims success for everlasting facial recognition in Croydon
The Met Police has introduced that its deployment of everlasting reside facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon has led to 103 arrests, with the power claiming it has lowered crime within the native space by 12%.
Starting in October 2025, the Met mounted 15 LFR-enabled cameras to road furnishings in Croydon, claiming they’d solely be activated when officers are current and conducting an operation within the space.
The Met’s announcement comes only a week forward of a judicial evaluation in opposition to its use of LFR, which can assess whether or not it has been utilizing the expertise lawfully. The authorized problem was launched by anti-knife campaigner Shaun Thompson after he was wrongly recognized as a suspect by the power’s LFR system, alongside privateness campaigners at Massive Brother Watch.
Whereas LFR is often deployed by the power in an overt method, with specifically geared up cameras mounted atop a visibly marked police van to scan and examine folks’s distinctive facial options in opposition to watchlists in actual time, this marks the Met’s first covert deployment of the cameras that may be monitored by officers remotely.
In a press launch, the Met claimed that working deployments with no van has elevated the effectivity of its LFR operations, with an arrest being made on common each 34 minutes when in use, whereas additionally decreasing the common time to find needed people by greater than 50% when put next with van-based deployments.
Of these arrested, it added a 3rd had been for offences associated to violence in opposition to ladies and ladies, equivalent to strangulation and sexual assault, with different arrests over recall to jail, housebreaking and possession of an offensive weapon.
“The rise in LFR deployments throughout crime hotspots in London is pushed by its confirmed affect and success – with greater than 1,700 harmful offenders taken off London’s streets because the begin of 2024, together with these needed for rape and baby abuse,” stated Lindsey Chiswick, the Met and nationwide lead for LFR.
“This is the reason we’re trialling a brand new and revolutionary pilot in Croydon,” she stated. “It permits us to discover a special manner of utilizing facial recognition by working it remotely and extra effectively. The quantity of arrests we’ve got made in simply 13 deployments exhibits the expertise is already making an affect and serving to to make Croydon safer. Public assist stays robust, with 85% of Londoners backing using LFR to maintain them protected.”
The Met added that its pilot deployment of everlasting LFR cameras will bear an analysis within the coming months to evaluate its effectiveness, however that there are at present no plans to increase its everlasting deployment to different websites in London.
It additionally stated the Met will proceed to run engagement classes with Croydon residents and councillors to elucidate how LFR works, define the intelligence-led strategy behind deployments, and set out the safeguards in place to guard privateness and rights.
Nonetheless, in April 2025, within the wake of the Met’s preliminary announcement, native councillors beforehand complained that the choice to arrange facial recognition cameras completely passed off with none group engagement from the power with native residents.
Whereas the Met has additional claimed that Croydon was chosen for the everlasting LFR deployment as a result of “its standing as against the law hotspot”, native councillors additionally highlighted a sample of racial bias in its alternative of deployment areas.
“The Met’s determination to roll out facial recognition in areas of London with greater Black populations reinforces the troubling assumption that sure communities … usually tend to be criminals,” stated Inexperienced Occasion London Meeting member Zoë Garbett on the time, including that whereas practically two million folks in whole had their faces scanned throughout the Met’s 2024 deployments, solely 804 arrests had been made – a charge of simply 0.04%.
The Met Police’s roll-out of LFR in different boroughs has equally taken place with little to no group engagement, and in some areas has occurred regardless of notable political opposition from native authorities.
Govt mayor of Croydon Jason Perry stated within the Met’s press launch, nevertheless, that the arrest figures present “that this pioneering expertise helps to make our streets safer”.
Damaged home windows within the panopticon
Perry added: “I look ahead to persevering with to work with the Met Police to deal with crime, as a part of our zero-tolerance strategy to fixing the ‘damaged home windows’, restoring delight in our borough and making Croydon a safer place for all our residents.”
Beneath the “damaged home windows” concept of policing, first posited by US criminologists James Wilson and George Kelling within the early Eighties, leaving even minor dysfunction unchecked (equivalent to graffiti, delinquent behaviour or vandalism) encourages folks to have interaction in additional critical crimes.
Whereas advocates of this strategy subsequently argue for the proactive, zero-tolerance policing of minor infractions as a manner of instilling order and deterring extra critical prison conduct, critics argue it encourages aggressive or confrontational policing practices that disproportionally goal poor and minoritised communities, in the end breeding resentment in opposition to authorities.
In a latest interview with former prime minister Tony Blair, present UK dwelling secretary Shabana Mahmood described her ambition to make use of applied sciences like synthetic intelligence (AI) and LFR to attain Jeremy Bentham’s imaginative and prescient of a “panopticon”, referring to his proposed jail design that will enable a single, unseen guard to silently observe each prisoner without delay.
Sometimes used immediately as a metaphor for authoritarian management, the underpinning concept of the panopticon is that, by instilling a perpetual sense of being watched among the many inmates, they’d behave as authorities needed.
“After I was in justice, my final imaginative and prescient for that a part of the prison justice system was to attain, by the use of AI and expertise, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do together with his panopticon,” Mahmood instructed Blair. “That’s that the eyes of the state might be on you always.”
LFR session on authorized framework
In December 2025, the Residence Workplace launched a 10-week session on using LFR by UK police, permitting events and members of the general public to share their views on how the controversial expertise must be regulated.
Whereas using LFR by police – starting with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has ramped up massively in recent times, there has to date been minimal public debate or session, with the Residence Workplace claiming for years that there’s already “complete” authorized framework in place.
Nonetheless, the Residence Workplace stated in late 2025 that though a “patchwork” authorized framework for police facial recognition exists (together with for the growing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” variations of the expertise), it doesn’t give police themselves the arrogance to “use it at considerably higher scale … nor does it constantly give the general public the arrogance that will probably be used responsibly”.
It added that the present guidelines governing police LFR use are “sophisticated and obscure”, and that an strange member of the general public could be required to learn 4 items of laws, police nationwide steerage paperwork and a spread of detailed authorized or knowledge safety paperwork from particular person forces to completely perceive the premise for LFR use on their excessive streets.
There have been repeated calls from each Parliament and civil society over a few years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.
This consists of three separate inquiries by the Justice and Residence Affairs Committee into shoplifting, police algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an impartial authorized evaluation by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Fee; and the Home of Commons Science and Expertise Committee, which known as for a moratorium on reside facial recognition way back to July 2019.
Extra not too long ago, the Ada Lovelace Institute printed a report in Could 2025 that stated the UK’s patchwork strategy to regulating biometric surveillance applied sciences is “insufficient”, inserting elementary rights in danger and in the end undermining public belief.
In August 2025, after being granted permission to intervene within the judicial evaluation of the Met’s LFR use, the UK’s equality watchdog stated the power is utilizing the expertise unlawfully, citing the necessity for its deployments to be crucial, proportionate and respectful of human rights.
