The inspectorate found officers sometimes acted without enough checks, while bias made ethnic minority people more likely to be wrongly flagged and custody images that should have been deleted were retained. It warned of a risk of mistaken identification or arrest.
Some UK police investigators acted on potential facial-recognition matches without making enough checks, and excessive reliance on the results led to inappropriate investigative action in a small number of cases, the police inspectorate found.
The inspectorate’s report, published on 11 November, followed independent testing commissioned by the Home Office in winter 2023 to help police understand and reduce bias and inform future investment decisions as they expanded facial-recognition searches. Existing guidance already required officers to check potential matches and seek other evidence before making decisions.
The inspectorate warned that treating a match as evidence could lead to incorrect identification or arrest. It also found that the algorithm was more likely to wrongly flag ethnic minority people as suspects, and that police had retained custody images that should have been deleted. The latter finding risked undermining public confidence, it said.
The inspection covered retrospective searches, which police use after an incident to identify someone. Officers can compare images from sources such as security cameras, phones and doorbells with custody images on the Police National Database, a national police intelligence system.
Under Home Office guidance, results are intelligence, not evidence: a trained user and an investigating officer must visually review potential matches, and investigators must seek corroboration before making operational or investigative decisions. The inspectorate found that some investigators did not know further inquiries were needed before enforcement action.
Auditors also found that users had submitted blurred images or images containing multiple faces, reducing the reliability of matches.
The inspectorate said there was no comprehensive statutory framework governing facial recognition, making it harder for forces to understand the lawful basis for its use and the safeguards needed. Inspector Kathryn Stone called for clearer law, stronger national standards, better oversight, effective management of bias and data retention risks, and continued human judgment.
Ben Russell, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s facial-recognition lead, said police remained committed to responsible use of retrospective searches to investigate crime and bring offenders to justice. Jasleen Chaggar of Big Brother Watch criticized the treatment of probability scores as evidence and said police were not logging their use of the searches. She criticized the lack of safeguards and said biased settings were more likely to misidentify women, Asian people and Black people.
The Home Office said the National Physical Laboratory’s testing found that, at the operational setting used by police, some demographic groups were more likely to be incorrectly included in results in a limited set of circumstances. It said police had reissued guidance on existing safeguards, the National Police Chiefs’ Council had updated impact and equitability assessments, and it had procured and independently tested a replacement algorithm capable of operating at settings with no significant demographic variation in performance.
The Home Office’s undated summary says the replacement is due for operational testing early next year, followed by evaluation.
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