Police told to use facial recognition for all crimes
11/04/2025 | The Telegraph
The independent police inspectorate has urged all UK police forces to "fully exploit" facial recognition technology (FRT) in every criminal investigation. The recommendation follows findings that some forces utilise the technology more than others, according to The Telegraph (£).
Officers are encouraged to gather images of targets, including witnesses and victims, from various sources, including social media, doorbell footage, and CCTV, in order to compare against the vast Police National Database (PND).
His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMIFRS) has praised police forces with higher search rates and recommended that no investigation be closed without cross-checking all available images against the PND and other relevant databases.
While police forces can adopt these recommendations at their discretion, this unprecedented push for facial recognition has sparked privacy concerns from MPs, regulators, and civil liberties campaigners, who are urging the government to establish clearer regulations for its use.
A separate investigation by The Telegraph revealed that police are currently conducting facial recognition searches on the public approximately every two minutes.
Last year alone, over a quarter of a million retrospective facial recognition searches were conducted in the UK, with the Metropolitan Police accounting for 30,000 of those searches, a tenfold increase since 2019.
What is this page?
You are reading a summary article on the Privacy Newsfeed, a free resource for DPOs and other professionals with privacy or data protection responsibilities helping them stay informed of industry news all in one place. The information here is a brief snippet relating to a single piece of original content or several articles about a common topic or thread. The main contributor is listed in the top left-hand corner, just beneath the article title.
The Privacy Newsfeed monitors over 300 global publications, of which more than 6,250 summary articles have been posted to the online archive dating back to the beginning of 2020. A weekly roundup is available by email every Friday.