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Since the start of 2024, the Metropolitan Police has been quietly transforming London into a testing ground for live facial recognition (LFR).
Depending on who you ask, this is either a technological triumph that’s making the capital safer or a mass surveillance experiment that would make any privacy advocate wince.
The numbers are eye-watering: in just over 18 months, the Met has scanned the faces of around 2.4 million people. And from that sea of biometric data, they’ve made 1,035 arrests. That’s a hit rate of 0.04%. Or, to put it plainly, more than 99.9% of those scanned had done absolutely nothing wrong.
The police, of course, are eager to present this as a success story. Lindsey Chiswick, who oversees the Met’s facial recognition program, calls it a game-changer. “This milestone of 1,000 arrests is a demonstration of how cutting-edge technology can make London safer by removing dangerous offenders from our streets,” she said.
Of those arrested, 773 were charged or cautioned. Some were suspects in serious cases, including violent crimes against women and girls.
But here’s where things get complicated. To secure those 1,000 arrests, millions of innocent people have had their faces scanned and processed.
What’s being billed as precision policing can start to look more like casting an enormous net and hoping you catch something worthwhile.
If the figures seem large now, just look at the trend. Back in January 2024, the Met’s cameras scanned 36,000 faces.
By November, that number was nearing 190,000 a month. In 2025, they’ve regularly topped 200,000, with February pushing past 300,000 scans.
And the Met isn’t alone.
The police insist the technology is targeted.
The scale of scanning raises uncomfortable questions about where the line is drawn and the implications of the future use of this technology.
Supporters argue that LFR saves time, helps track down suspects, and modernizes policing in a way that matches the scale of modern crime.
At what point does surveillance stop being smart policing and start becoming a permanent fixture of public life? And once that infrastructure is in place, how easy would it be to dial it back?
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Author: Cam Wakefield
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