The Metropolitan Police plans to roll out live facial recognition (LFR) technology in the West End and Soho by December, aiming to curb crime in high-footfall areas. The move follows a six-month pilot in Croydon where 173 arrests were made after scanning 470,000 faces, with only one incorrect match, according to the force.
Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: “We want to build on our success by introducing this capability to the West End and Soho by December. The use of static cameras will help us continue cutting crime in high-footfall areas in central London.” The deployment is timed for the pre-Christmas period.
Privacy concerns and chilling effects
Civil liberties groups argue LFR is far more intrusive than traditional CCTV. While CCTV records scenes, facial recognition scans faces, processes biometric data, and checks individuals against a watchlist. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people could be scanned as they go about their daily lives.
Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, said: “If you haven’t been a society in which you don’t know if you’re being watched at any given time, there’s a chilling effect.” She added that LFR reverses traditional policing logic: instead of identifying a suspect and deploying surveillance, it starts with the crowd and works backwards.
The Met says biometric templates from people who do not trigger an alert are deleted automatically and immediately, and watchlists are deleted after deployments. However, CCTV footage can be retained for up to 31 days, or longer in limited circumstances.
Unproven case for deployment
Pete Fussey, a surveillance expert at the University of Southampton, said: “The case for deployment hasn’t been made publicly and robustly. Often what we hear is that we need this technology to keep the public safe. Nobody disputes that but everybody has a right to privacy, even in the public space.” He argues police must show the technology is necessary and proportionate.
Marion Oswald, professor of law at Northumbria University, noted: “The case for live facial recognition, and in particular to rolling it out into static cameras in particular locations is still unproven. We don’t know enough about what the benefits are and what the consequences are, as well.” She also highlighted that Soho at night is a very different environment from Croydon, and it is unclear how the tools will perform there.
Cost and legal gaps
The cost of the Croydon pilot and planned West End rollout has not been published. The Home Office says it spent £2.8 million last year on national LFR capabilities, including vans and fixed location pilots, and a further £6.6 million this year.
Chaggar said the UK lacks a legal framework specifically for facial recognition. “At the moment there aren’t any laws that specifically mention facial recognition,” she said. Big Brother Watch wants tighter rules to restrict its use.
Fussey questioned whether LFR is the most effective use of police resources. Officers are needed to monitor the system, intervene when a match is made, manage public-facing operations, and handle governance. “If at the end of that you’re only catching a few minor offenders, then there’s a really important question of whether finite police resources could be properly redirected for public safety in more effective ways,” he said.
Disproportionate impact on certain groups
Fussey also noted that surveillance disproportionately affects certain demographics. “A white middle-class professor like me probably does have nothing to fear from the police, but people from other demographics absolutely mistrust the police, and they see it as a much more hostile act,” he said.
The question remains whether the cameras can find wanted people and what kind of public space London is willing to create to make it work.
