BiasMedium
UK Facial Recognition System Reportedly Exhibits Higher False Positive Rates for Black and Asian Subjects
- Occurred
- Dec 5, 2025
- Published
- Dec 5, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
UK government testing of police facial recognition technology reportedly found significantly higher false positive identification rates for Black and Asian individuals compared with white subjects, with particularly elevated error rates for Black women. The findings reportedly emerged from analysis of retrospective searches of the police national database and were disclosed by the Home Office amid plans for expanded national deployment.
Developers
- Unknown facial recognition technology developers
Deployers
- Home Office
- Metropolitan Police
- Government of the United Kingdom
- Law enforcement
- British law enforcement
Harmed parties
- General public
- General public of the United Kingdom
- Minorities in the United Kingdom
- Black people in the United Kingdom
- Asian people in the United Kingdom
- Epistemic integrity
- National security and intelligence stakeholders
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: System shows discriminatory error rates against specific demographics, constituting a bias incident.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8