UK facial recognition errors put minorities at risk of arrest
A UK police watchdog report warns that inaccurate facial recognition technology and algorithmic bias place innocent ethnic minorities at serious risk of wrongful arrest.
UK police officers risk arresting innocent people, particularly from ethnic minorities, by treating flawed retrospective facial recognition data as direct evidence, an official report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary warned on Wednesday.
While the biometric technology assists criminal investigations, the police watchdog found it is beset by algorithmic biases and operational errors. The system is disproportionately likely to misidentify individuals from minority backgrounds as suspects. Inspectors noted that investigators often failed to conduct necessary verification enquiries before making arrests, improperly relying on automated intelligence matches.
The review also revealed that officers uploaded blurred images containing multiple faces, severely reducing matching accuracy. Furthermore, watchdog auditors discovered that custody photographs that should have been deleted were unlawfully kept in force databases.
Source: The Guardian Photo: rawpixel (CC0)
