Police’s face cameras can recognise just 1 in 3 women

CONTROVERSIAL facial recognition cameras used by the Metropolitan Police – which could be rolled out across the UK – correctly identify only a third of women, an official report admits.

A review of the technology by Scotland Yard also reveals just two in three men are accurately identified, while black people are far more likely to be wrongly flagged up than white people. Critics say the findings underline fears the system will lead to innocent people being wrongly stopped and searched, while genuine suspects are not identified.

The Met announced last month that it is rolling out the operational use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology to tackle serious crime. It was used for the first time last Tuesday at a retail area in East London. No arrests were made.

The Met’s analysis of months of trials also reveals that the cameras can scan five faces at a time. During just 69 hours of experimental trials, its cameras captured the faces of 180,000 people. Yet despite the huge numbers of people scanned, only nine suspects were arrested.

The Met said: ‘In a single test we did observe differences in the way the LFR algorithm responded to gender, that the system is less likely to trigger alerts in relation to women.’