Tuesday briefing: How AI facial recognition in policing works – and how it can go wrong

In depth: ‘There’s a sense that it’s happening in a creeping way’

Guardian reporter Robert Booth gets added to the watchlist and is spotted by its cameras. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

One afternoon recently in Croydon, Robert Booth watched as police officers trialled a deployment of live facial recognition cameras. Mounted high above the street, the cameras were switched on for a few hours at a time. Nearby, uniformed and plainclothes officers lingered, waiting. When someone on a watchlist passed through the camera’s field of view, an alert was sent to officers’ phones. What happened next was striking.

“It was like a trap snapping shut,” Robert tells me. Within seconds, officers converged on the individual – “a kind of net closing” – often before the person had any idea they had been identified. In one case, he saw a man taken to the ground by several officers in a matter of moments.

“It all just happens in a flash,” he says. “That kind of thing happening in the public sphere, enabled entirely by technology, feels quite new.”

How does it work – and why now?

Live facial recognition systems, as Robert wrote in this explainer, scan faces captured on camera and compare them against watchlists compiled by police or private operators. If the system identifies a potential match, it alerts officers, who can then decide whether to intervene.

Part of the appeal is clear: it can be effective. Police say it has led to arrests, and businesses claim it acts as a deterrent to shoplifting.

But the rapid uptake of facial recognition reflects a broader pattern seen with other technologies, from social media to age verification, where adoption has outpaced the development of clear regulatory frameworks to govern it. And use is rocketing: so far this year the Metropolitan police in London has scanned more than 1.7 million faces, up 87% on the same period in 2025.

The ‘edge cases’ where concern arises

On Monday, social affairs correspondent Jessica Murray reported on the case of Ian Clayton, a retired health and safety professional from Chester. He is one of a number of people who have spoken to the Guardian after being falsely identified as a thief by shops using Facewatch, a live facial recognition system. He described the experience of being thrown out of a store after his face was flagged as “very Orwellian”, adding “it was like I was guilty until proven innocent.”

“These are straightforwardly difficult and wrong situations. The question is how widespread those cases are,” Robert says. “The technology itself may improve, and the systems around how it’s used may improve, too,” he adds. Even so, a small error rate can easily become significant if the technology is deployed more widely.

Beyond individual errors, there is a broader concern about the cumulative effect of the technology – that simply moving through public space increasingly involves being unknowinglymonitored and checked against databases.

What do the public think?

Robert spoke to people in Croydon when he was observing the police using the system. “Some take the view that if you’ve got nothing to hide, there’s nothing to worry about,” he tells me. “They also point out that our faces are already used in lots of different ways online and for unlocking our phones.”

Others are more concerned. “They worry about the risk of mistaken identity, and the fact they may not even have noticed the cameras. There’s a sense that it’s happening in a creeping way.”

There are also people who are very much opposed to its use. Robert says they consider hundred and thousands of faces being scanned in public as “a clear infringement of their liberties”. The campaign group Liberty have warned that, as the situation stands, police could use the tool as a means of intimidation at protests, retroactively on any image or footage they hold, and have used it to track children as young as 12. Data has also shown that systems are more likely to incorrectly include black and Asian people than their white counterparts in search results.

What happens now?

“The key question is whether regulators can make sure the downsides of the technology don’t happen – so that people can feel they’re getting the benefits without the harms,” Robert says.

One thing is clear – oversight is fragmented. Several bodies are involved, including the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Watchdogs have warned that this patchwork approach is struggling to keep pace with the technology’s rapid development. The Home Office has said it is considering a new legal framework for the technology.

For now, the direction of travel is clear. “The technology is clearly going to keep advancing,” Robert says. “The question is whether the rules around it can keep up.”

What else we’ve been reading

‘More about violence’ … the artwork Relatum by Lee Ufan. Photograph: Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images

• The Guardian’s Arts editor, Alex Needham, ventured to Japan’s “art island”, Naoshima, guided by the avant garde creative, Lee Ufan. The Korean-born artist, whose retrospective opens in Venice next weekend, discusses finding inspiration in Duchamp – and why he once chased three enormous sheets of paper in Tokyo. Yassin El-Moudden, newsletters team
• Nobody likes a break-up or delivering bad news. Isabel Bekele looks at the people using AI chatbots to rehearse awkward conversations in advance. Martin
• Combining a pedal steel guitar with the Turkish saz, the third solo album by former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij blends Americana with sounds from south-west Asia. It’s Batmanglij’s “best to date”, according to Shaad D’Souza, who spoke with the Iranian-American musician in this great interview. Yassin
• My colleague Sammy Gecsoyler was sent to Birmingham to investigate the death of UK clubbing, asking: “Whatever happened to Saturday night?” Martin
• This fascinating exclusive on Kenya’s AI-powered healthcare system follows months of investigations into how the technology is being used to means-test the amount of contributions patients are expected to make – with disastrous consequences for the poorest. Yassin

Sport

Taiwo Awoniyi of Nottingham Forest with Morgan Gibbs-White of Nottingham Forest celebrate after scoring a goal to put Nottingham Forest 3-0 ahead during the Premier League match with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge Stadium, London, England, on 4 May. Photograph: Daniel Weir/Sports Press Photo/Shutterstock

Football | Four players were taken off with head injuries as Nottingham Forest eased to a 3-1 win against Calum McFarlane’s Chelsea. A wild 3-3 draw at Everton for Manchester City may have handed Arsenal the edge in the title race.

Snooker | Wu Yize has won the World Snooker Championship final, beating Shaun Murphy 18-17, with a break of 85 in the deciding frame.

Cycling | The 19-year-old French prodigy, Paul Seixas, is set to become the youngest Tour de France cyclist in 89 years, raising hopes that he may become the country’s first homegrown winner since 1985.

The front pages

Guardian front page, 5 May, 2026. Photograph: Guardian

“Trump’s bid to reopen Hormuz pushes region back to the brink” is the Guardian’s splash on Tuesday, while the FT says “Iran warns US not to enter Hormuz strait and launches drones at UAE”.

Ahead of the local elections, the i Paper leads with “Leadership rivals circle Starmer as local election ‘bloodbath’ looms for Labour.” The Times runs with “Labour MPs plot Starmer putsch after poll losses,” while the Mirror writes “Stop him” underneath a picture of Nigel Farage. Kemi Badenoch tells the Daily Mail “Britain needs zero tolerance on crimes that make our lives a misery” and the Sun leads with: “Just one more small boat and arrivals hit … 200,000”.

The Metro focuses on tensions with Brussels under the headline “Starmer walks EU tightrope”. The Telegraph’s top story is “Met seeks UK trial for Madeleine suspect,” and finally the Express with “Fan ban police tsar campaigns with man behind vile abuse”.

Today in Focus

Singer Cameron Winter of Geese performs on day 2 of Coachella on 18 April 2026 in Indio, California. Photograph: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images for Coachella

Fake fans, fake buzz? How your favourite band got big

Shaad D’Souza explains how bands such as Geese have faced a backlash since a marketing company revealed its tricks for pushing them into the limelight, and Eamonn Forde discusses what it takes to succeed in the music industry today.

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

Ben Jennings cartoon Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

A VR headset pilot programme across Sutton schools has reported improved attendance and reduced exam anxiety. Photograph: Phase Space

High schools in one London borough are trying a new way to help students deal with anxiety caused by exams, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and challenging home lives: virtual reality. Schools in the borough of Sutton are teaming up with a local NHS mental health trust to trial the use of VR headsets by the tech company Phase Space.

In the first 10 schools that tried out the devices, 90% of students saw an immediate drop in their stress levels, while attendance has improved and anxiety around exams has decreased. Sixteen-year-old pupil Lora Wilson described using the tool: “It’s very difficult to explain but it’s a really cool experience. It almost feels like I’m somewhere else and I can just relax.”

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