Security News > 2023 > October > UK policing minister urges doubling down on face-scanning tech

A UK minister for policing has called for forces to double their use of algorithmic-assisted facial recognition in a bid to snare more criminals.

Chris Philp MP, Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire, said both the use of live and retrospective facial recognition should increase following a commitment to spend £17.5 million on "a resilient and highly accurate system" to search all databases of images the police can access.

Retrospective facial recognition relies on an image taken at a crime scene - using CCTV, police cameras, or phone footage - to scan police databases to find a match.

"Searching the whole Police National Database image set rather than just local force ones will maximise the chance of a match, and I encourage routine use of RFR across the entire range of crimes."

Speaking to Parliament's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee in May, Dr Tony Mansfield, principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory, said the system used by the Met, the UK's largest police force, was prone to bias against Black individuals on a set of test data created for his investigations.

In 2018, Big Brother Watch found that 91 percent of people flagged up on the Met's facial recognition system were not on the watch list.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/10/31/uk_police_minister_lfr/