Cases › biased or discriminatory › LR-2026-0354

UK police facial recognition shown to have racial bias for Black and Asian subjects

Confirmed Why: 2 independent outlets · 2 independent reports

Developing: a major or severe case captured in the last 72 hours. Later changes are logged on the corrections page.

Status: no action reported

No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.

Severity major: Test: regulator involved. Fact: the UK data protection watchdog (ICO) asked the Home Office for urgent clarity over racial bias before considering next steps.

The Home Office's retrospective facial recognition tool, used by UK police to match images against the police national database of known or wanted criminals, was tested by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The testing found it was more likely to incorrectly match Black and Asian people than white people. The false positive identification rate for white subjects was 0.04%, against 4.0% for Asian subjects and 5.5% for Black subjects. The Home Office admitted the bias after the testing. The UK data protection watchdog asked the Home Office for urgent clarity, and police and crime commissioners urged caution over national expansion. The Home Office said it had procured a new algorithm with no statistically significant bias and asked the police inspectorate and forensic science regulator to review use of the technology.source

LR-2026-0354 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON