Sadiq Khan reveals 100 officers will use roaming technology for six months but opponents call its use ‘alarming’
Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor Sadiq Khan but branded “alarming” by opponents.
The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. He was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.
The move by the UK’s largest force will extend the spread of face scanning in policing which has already been deployed with cameras on vans and in fixed locations including in Croydon, Manchester and South Wales. Retrospective facial recognition systems are also widely in use across the UK.
This week the Guardian revealed how police arrested a man for a burglary in a city 100 miles away that he had never visited after software confused him with another person of south Asian heritage. It also emerged the Met has signed a £490,000 three-month contract with the controversial US AI firm Palantir to try to detect rogue officers based on their wider conduct.
