PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Biometrics (24 April 2024)

Facial recognition is used by police as an identification tool to search an image of an unknown suspect against the images of people taken on arrest (‘custody images’), or to locate people in an intelligence-led way, by scanning live crowds and comparing them with the images of wanted people on a specific watchlist instantaneously, with very high levels of accuracy.

An arrest may result from a match made by facial recognition software, but not without the match being carefully reviewed by a trained officer and consideration being made of the wider context and other available information. Investigating officers will consider all of the evidence available and follow up all reasonable enquiries as in any normal investigation. Moreover, a prosecution and/or conviction would never be based solely on a match made by facial recognition software.

There are no centrally held figures on the number of arrests that result from police forces using facial recognition technology. South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police Service publish information on their use of facial recognition, including arrests figures and other positive outcomes from deploying live facial recognition. These can be found at the following links:

https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/fr/facial-recognition-technology/

https://www.south-wales.police.uk/police-forces/south-wales-police/areas/about-us/about-us/facial-recognition-technology/

Given that a facial match using facial recognition software would be one of many factors under consideration in reaching the decision to prosecute and/or resulting in a person being convicted of an offence it is not possible to attribute exact numbers of prosecutions and convictions. However, we are undertaking evaluation work to enhance our understanding of the impact of facial recognition in this regard.