Cases › biased or discriminatory › LR-2026-0431
Facial recognition error prompts police to arrest Asian man for burglary
Preliminary Why: 1 report: The Guardian · subject to change · 1 independent report
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.
Severity moderate: Test: data or systems of others touched, with a bounded scope stated. Fact: live scanning captured about 100,000 faces across five named locations. No count of two or more affected third parties is stated, so not major.
UK police used facial recognition software, supplied by Cognitec through the Home Office, to match CCTV footage of a burglary suspect against police mugshots. The software matched Alvi Choudhury, a software engineer in Southampton, to a suspect in Milton Keynes about 100 miles away. Thames Valley police arrested him in January and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him. Home Office research had earlier found far higher false-positive rates for Black and Asian faces at certain settings. Thames Valley police said the arrest followed a human visual assessment and denied it was unlawful. Choudhury is claiming damages. The Home Office said guidance and training were under review, and a new, independently tested national system is in development.
What happened
No source tells the story step by step yet.
What was done
No source states an action or fix.
Risks
Read from the sources; not yet reviewed by a person.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
ApplicationBias testing · Risk assessment per deployment · Output filtering and redaction
Similar incidents
Evidence
No source states: a step-by-step account, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 4 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- 2021 Choudhury was wrongly arrested in 2021 and his mugshot was retained on the police system.
- January Police arrested Choudhury at his home in Southampton and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours.
- December The technology was revealed to produce a far higher false-positive rate for black and Asian faces at certain settings.
Not dated in the sources:
- Thames Valley police admitted to Choudhury that the arrest may have been the result of bias in the facial recognition technology.
Show every field, with its source and grade
The AI system
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
Choudhury's claims that bias or the officer's motive caused the arrest are his allegations, and the police deny racial profiling, so they are not recorded as findings.
LR-2026-0431 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON