The #BBC report includes no data that casts doubt on the #Met's findings despite prior research contradicting claims presented exist. It’s a press release, not news.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cddpzglzrv7o
The BBC simply presents the police's statistics: 173 arrests, 10.5% crime reduction, 21% VAWG reduction, 1 false alert, without any independent audit data, methodological critique, bias statistics, or counter-studies.
For instance, a Cambridge study found no deterrence effect, the NPL bias report showing 100–248× higher false positive rates for non-white faces, or documented wrongful arrests.
[…] Overall Conclusions
Taken together, the studies suggest that:
• Live Facial Recognition can identify wanted individuals with high accuracy when used under appropriate conditions.
• Mistaken identifications appear to be very rare in operational deployments.
• The technology identifies some demographic groups more successfully than others, which raises questions about fairness that require continued monitoring.
• Crime deterrence effects were not observed in this study.
• Because #LFR scans very large numbers of people to identify a small number of suspects, decisions about its use should carefully consider issues of proportionality, transparency and oversight.
https://www.essex.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/essex/about-us/live-facial-recognition/2026-03-12-lfr-accuracy-watchlists-deterrence-cambs-uni.pdf
Essex police pause facial recognition camera use after study finds racial bias
[…] Academics discover black people ‘significantly more likely’ to be identified when compared with other ethnic groups
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/19/essex-police-pause-facial-recognition-camera-use-study-racial-bias
#bbc #met #LFR #uk #aicon #aihype