Met Police to double facial recognition use amid finances cuts
The Metropolitan Police will greater than double its variety of reside facial recognition (LFR) deployments to cowl the lack of 1,400 officers and 300 workers amid finances cuts.
Detailing its restructuring plans – which additionally embrace bulking up the pressure’s protest-focused “public order crime” group and placing extra officers on the beat – the Met mentioned LFR will now be deployed as much as 10 instances every week throughout 5 days, up from the present charge of 4 deployments over two days.
Whereas the restructuring announcement famous 90 further officers could be deployed to 6 “high-crime” zones – together with Brixton, Kingston, Ealing, Finsbury Park, Southwark, and Spitalfields – it’s unclear if these areas would additionally see a larger variety of LFR deployments.
The initiative follows the pressure warning in April 2025 that it faces a £260m finances shortfall for the approaching yr.
Met commissioner Mark Rowley defended the transfer, saying the know-how is used responsibly and solely deployed to search for critical offenders.
“We routinely put it on the market and seize a number of critical offenders in a single go, a lot of whom have dedicated critical offences towards girls or kids, or people who find themselves needed for armed theft,” he mentioned.
“It’s a improbable piece of know-how. It’s very responsibly used, and that’s why many of the public help it.”
On the restructuring generally, Rowley added: “Whereas our finances has decreased in actual phrases, we’re utilizing this extra [£32m] funding from Metropolis Corridor and House Workplace productively to help our mission to take a focused strategy to tackling quantity crime and bolster our specialist ways to disrupt the legal gangs who gas anti-social behaviour, theft and theft.”
Marketing campaign group Liberty’s coverage and campaigns officer Charlie Whelton mentioned rising LFR use was “extremely regarding” given the shortage of regulation for the know-how.
“Any tech which has the potential to infringe on our rights in the way in which scanning and figuring out thousands and thousands of individuals does must have sturdy safeguards round its use, together with making certain that correct impartial oversight is in place,” he mentioned.
“The federal government should legislate now to manage this know-how, defend folks’s rights, and guarantee that the regulation on facial recognition doesn’t get outpaced by the use.”
In July 2025, house secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed for the primary time that the UK authorities will search to manage police facial recognition by creating “a correct, clear governance framework”, citing police reticence to deploy methods with out satisfactory guidelines in place. Nevertheless, she declined to say if any new framework can be statutory.
Ongoing issues
Whereas the Met maintains that its deployments are intelligence-led and focus completely on finding people needed for critical crimes, senior officers beforehand admitted to a Lords committee in December 2023 that the pressure selects photos for its watchlist primarily based on crime classes connected to folks’s photographs, fairly than a context-specific evaluation of the menace introduced by a given particular person.
This contains these needed for non-serious crimes corresponding to shoplifting or site visitors offences.
Educational Karen Yeung, an interdisciplinary professorial fellow in regulation, ethics and informatics at Birmingham Regulation Faculty, challenged the proportionality and necessity of this strategy throughout the identical Lords session, claiming the coercive energy of the state means police should be capable to justify every entry to the watchlists primarily based on the precise circumstances concerned, fairly than their blanket inclusion through “crime sorts”.
Critics have additionally raised issues in regards to the Met’s disproportionate use of LFR, by way of watchlist sizes, faces scanned, and impacts on sure communities.
Civil liberties group Huge Brother Watch, for instance, has repeatedly highlighted how the scale of the Met’s LFR watchlist – which is now routinely exceeding 15,000 faces – signifies the deployments should not intelligence-led or focused.
Commenting within the wake of a February 2022 LFR deployment in Westminster, the place the watchlist contained 9,756 photos, Huge Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo informed Pc Weekly, “That’s not a focused and specified deployment due to a urgent want – it’s a catch web.”
In keeping with knowledge gathered by Inexperienced Get together London Meeting member Zoë Garbett, over half of the Met’s 180 LFR deployments that befell throughout 2024 had been additionally in areas the place the proportion of Black residents is larger than town’s common, together with Lewisham and Haringey.
Whereas Black folks comprise 13.5% of London’s complete inhabitants, the proportion is far larger within the Met’s deployment areas, with Black folks making up 36% of the Haringey inhabitants, 34% of the Lewisham inhabitants, and 40.1% of the Croydon inhabitants, the place the Met can also be planning to deploy everlasting LFR cameras.
Garbett added that whereas practically two million folks in complete had their faces scanned throughout the Met’s 2024 deployments, solely 804 arrests had been made – a charge of simply 0.04%.
The Met mentioned in July this yr that because the begin of 2024, greater than 1,000 arrests have been made utilizing LFR, 773 of which led to the person being charged or cautioned.
Equally, whereas the Met claims its use of the know-how is supported by the vast majority of the general public, there have been situations the place it has deployed LFR regardless of public opposition.
In December 2024, for instance, Pc Weekly revealed that, opposite to the pressure’s declare its LFR deployments in Lewisham are supported by the vast majority of residents and native councillors, there was minimal direct session with residents, whereas councillors clearly continued to precise issues about it.
“What folks help is safer streets and improved fairness and group cohesion,” Inexperienced Lewisham councillor Hau-Yu Tam informed Pc Weekly on the time. “They don’t essentially help reside facial recognition, which they’re not given the complete rundown of, or they’re given very deceptive details about.”
In January 2023, Newham Council additionally unanimously handed a movement to droop using LFR all through the borough till biometric and anti-discrimination safeguards are in place.
Whereas the movement highlighted the potential of LFR to “exacerbate racist outcomes in policing” – notably in Newham, essentially the most ethnically numerous of all native authorities in England and Wales – each the Met and the House Workplace mentioned that they’d press ahead with the deployments anyway.
