The Labour government thinks facial recognition technology is “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching”. It wants all police forces to use it and recently announced 40 new vans rigged with live facial recognition cameras to be deployed in town centres across England and Wales.
Supporters say it streamlines police work and catches criminals. Opponents fear it violates civil liberties and can be biased against minorities.
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How does it work?
The simplest systems check faces captured on CCTV, mobile phones, dashcams, social media and doorbell cameras against mugshots held on the police national database. The technology typically works by superimposing images, measuring angles and distances between facial landmarks such as eyes, moles and scars to make a data-based check. This kind of retrospective facial recognition technology is used during investigations and is available to all forces in England and Wales.
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What about the surveillance cameras we are seeing more of in town centres?
This is live facial recognition (LFR) technology that lets police scan every passing face, capture its biometric data and use AI-powered software at a remote operations centre to compare it in real time with watchlists of people whom the police want to arrest or keep an eye on, perhaps because they are on probation. Some of these are mounted on clearly marked police vans but trials are under way in which some are fixed to lamp-posts.
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How do police use this live information?
If there is a match, the two photos, the suspect’s name and alleged crime are pinged to mobile devices held by police officers waiting near the cameras. Their job is to instantly judge if the match is good and, if so, apprehend the person. The cameras tend to be switched on in three- to four-hour spells in busy town centres and at big events.
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What happens to the images of the passersby that are hoovered up
If a face is not matched to a wanted list, it is permanently deleted from the police system. This is the case for almost every scan. Anyone who attended the British Grand Prix at Silverstone since 2023 is likely to have been among the nearly one million faces scanned over just a few days by Northamptonshire police. Whether it was worth it in this case is another question. The mass surveillance at Silverstone triggered zero alerts.
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Is this live facial recognition in use in my area?
Thirteen police forces in England and Wales have or are using LFR. The Met in London is the biggest user. It started in 2020, but data since April 2023 shows more than 6.6 million faces have been scanned. In the last two years, use has been accelerated dramatically. In 2026 so far, 1.7m scans have resulted in 44 arrests.
In the first three months of this year, South Wales police scanned more than 230,000 faces in the centres of Cardiff, Swansea, Bridgend and Merthyr Tydfil with 10 matches and five arrests. In 2024 and 2025, Essex police scanned 2.2 million faces and made 117 arrests. A total of 60,000 residents of Staines, Camberley, Ashford and Epsom have been scanned in 2026 by Surrey police’s LFR cameras leading to two arrests. Other forces that have used LFR are Leicestershire, north Wales, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Sussex.
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Does it have problems with racial bias?
The technology has historically been more likely to make errors with people from minority ethnic backgrounds. One study of an early system showed it made no errors with light-skinned males but erred in one in five cases with dark-skinned females. It appears to have improved.
A study published in March of deployments by Essex police showed about half of the people on a watchlist were correctly identified and incorrect identifications were extremely rare, but the system was more likely to correctly identify men than women and it was “statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify black participants than participants from other ethnic groups”.
Another issue is where it is deployed. Research by the London assembly found that, over one recent year, more than half of the technology’s deployments took place in areas with a higher proportion of black residents than the London average.
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Who oversees the technology?
Police forces face scrutiny from a wide range of bodies whose job it is, only partially, to worry about facial recognition. They include the information commissioner, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the courts – which last month backed the Metropolitan police’s use of the technology.
Elected police and crime commissioners, the forensics regulator, the investigatory powers commissioner and the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioners also have oversight. It is a scattered picture and the government is consulting on a new legal framework.
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What next for surveillance cameras?
The number of faces scanned every week is expected to keep rising and Police Scotland, which does not use LFR, plans to start using it. Police intend to start using their phones to scan faces in limited circumstances including where the subject has refused to provide their details, if they are unconscious, incapable owing to drink or drugs, or dead. This is known as operator-initiated facial recognition.
The next frontier could be cameras that analyse human movements for behaviours such as loitering or aggressive postures, or even facial expressions to infer emotional states. The government’s consultation on a new legal framework asks for views on whether it should cover “technology that analyses the body and its movements to infer information about the person, such as their emotions or actions”.
