London’s Metropolitan Police (the Met) say cameras that check every passing face against a watchlist have led to more than 3,000 arrests in the past two years. The system, called live facial recognition, uses AI software to alert officers in real time when a passerby seems to match someone they are looking for. On November 4, 2026, the British government said the technology will get its own law, and that a new watchdog will oversee police use of technology.
Days earlier in Australia, Western Australia’s state police (WA Police) published the final results of a trial in Perth and other parts of the state. Between June 22 and October 31, 2026, the trial’s cameras scanned 1,380,882 faces, and officers made 122 arrests.
Britain plans a law, a watchdog and more vans
Under the Home Office plan, drawn up by Britain’s interior ministry, a new law will require police use of facial recognition to be “intelligence led and proportionate.” That means officers may switch it on only where they believe wanted people could be present.
A new independent watchdog will oversee police use of current and future technologies. If a police force breaks the rules, the watchdog can, in extreme cases, ask a court to order it to stop using them.
The government will also write two legal codes of practice: one for the police, and one for businesses that use facial recognition against crime, such as shops. That second code comes as AI spreads through British companies. One in three firms with five or more employees used some form of AI in 2026, a government survey found.
Every police technology will have to be tested independently for bias by age, gender and race. The Home Office says it has already tested a new algorithm for retrospective facial recognition, which searches existing images after the fact. Forces can start using it next year, the department says. The measures follow an £11 million investment to triple the number of live facial recognition vans available to police in England and Wales, according to the government.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who runs the Home Office, called facial recognition “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching.” The announcement names no bill and gives no date for the law. The plan follows a public consultation, an open call for comments, that the government launched last December, BBC London reported.
Sarah Jones, the policing minister, told the BBC that forces now work under a “patchwork” of laws. She also set a limit: “If I had an outstanding parking fine, I would not expect this technology to be used for that.”
The courts are debating AI too. The former head of the civil courts of England and Wales retired at the end of October. He thinks AI could decide some low-value claims if the parties consent or a law allows it.
London adds fixed cameras on lampposts
In most London operations today, police send a camera van to a chosen area, the BBC explains. When the software flags a face, officers check the match themselves before deciding whether to stop the person. The Met says faces that do not match anyone on the watchlist are deleted instantly.
From October 2025 to March 2026, the Met tested fixed cameras on lampposts in Croydon, a district of south London, and reported the results in May. Over 24 operations, officers made 173 arrests, or one every 35 minutes.
More than 470,000 people walked past the Croydon cameras. The system produced one false alert, which ended with a brief stop. The Met says the cameras are switched on only during an operation, with officers on the street. Each watchlist is built no more than 24 hours in advance and deleted afterward.
The Met reports that crime in the area fell 10.5% compared with the same months a year earlier. Offenses linked to violence against women and girls fell 21%.
In December, the Met plans to bring fixed cameras to the West End and Soho, two of central London’s busiest districts. Matt Jukes, the Met’s deputy commissioner, told the BBC that Oxford Street, the city’s main shopping street, is “obviously” under consideration. Officers are also piloting handheld devices.
“We’ve made over 3,000 arrests using this technology,” Jukes said, pointing in particular to registered sex offenders caught breaking their conditions. The Met’s annual report for September 2024 to September 2025 counted 962 arrests from live facial recognition, the tech news site The Register reported. At London’s Notting Hill Carnival this year, more than 270,000 faces were scanned with one false alert, according to Met data cited by the BBC. Outside London, at least four regional police forces in England used the technology for the first time in the six months to June 2026, the civil liberties group Statewatch reported.
Western Australia’s five-month trial
Western Australia’s trial used cameras on or near marked police vehicles. Between June 22 and October 31, the force deployed them 100 times at 43 locations, according to WA Police. The cameras scanned 1,380,882 faces and raised 292 alerts. Police made 122 arrests, spoke to 146 registered sex offenders flagged by the system and located 10 people for welfare checks.
Nine of the 292 alerts were wrong. WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch said officers spoke to each person wrongly flagged. “No one was arrested. No one made a complaint,” he told reporters, The Guardian reported. About the nine errors, he said: “It’s not zero. We’d love it to be zero.”
The force says faces of people not on its watchlist were pixelated in real time and not saved. WA Police is now running an internal evaluation of the system’s performance, effectiveness, community impact and governance. The software is NEC’s NeoFace M40, the trade site Biometric Update reports.
What the police numbers leave out
The first question is how errors are counted. The police divide false alerts by every face scanned, which gives 0.00065% in Western Australia and 0.0003% in the Met’s 2024 to 2025 report. Measured against alerts instead, about 3% were wrong in Western Australia (9 of 292) and about 0.5% in London (10 of 2,077, The Register’s calculation). As with Waymo’s robotaxi crash figures, these numbers come from the forces themselves.
Bias is the second question. Of the 10 false alerts in the Met’s 2024 to 2025 report, seven involved Black men and one a Black woman. The report says the imbalance is not statistically significant and names one possible factor: the cameras were deployed in crime hotspots. The Met says the National Physical Laboratory, Britain’s national measurement lab, assessed its use of the system as accurate and fair.
An arrest is not a conviction. “We will only know what the incorrect rate is when the 122 people arrested have their day in court,” said Bill Rowlings of Civil Liberties Australia, a rights group. He accused WA Police of “severely gilding the lily,” or overselling its results, by claiming an error rate of 0.00065%. The Met’s Croydon crime figures have a similar limit: a before-and-after comparison cannot show, on its own, how much of the drop the cameras caused.
Scale is the third question. The Western Australian trial’s 1.38 million scans equal about 45% of the state’s population, by Biometric Update’s count. Some people were almost certainly scanned more than once. In Britain, Jasleen Chaggar of Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, told the BBC: “It’s an indiscriminate tool which scans the face of every single person who walks by the camera.”
In August, the British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s suspended the technology at one London store after a customer was wrongly confronted as a shoplifter. The chain blamed the mistake on human error.
What it means
In London, live facial recognition is now part of everyday policing. The Met is adding lamppost cameras to its vans, and the Home Office is paying for more vans. On the forces’ own counts, false alerts are rare, though the Met’s bias figures rest on only 10 false alerts. The open questions now are about reach: which streets get cameras, who goes on a watchlist and who can turn the system off.
Britain is expanding the technology and regulating it at the same time. The main new check is the watchdog’s power to seek a court order against a force. After the Met won a High Court case against privacy campaigners in April, its commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said the government should consider how to “enable rather than over regulate” these technologies. Jukes now says that, so far, the framework taking shape is one the force can work with.
The details will decide how far the cameras spread: the text of the law, the limits it puts on watchlists and locations, and the bias figures in the Met’s next annual report. In Western Australia, the police evaluation will show whether the five-month trial becomes a permanent tool.
Sources
- Stronger laws for police using facial recognition technology, Home Office, GOV.UK, November 4, 2026
- Minister pledges facial recognition law ‘safeguards’, BBC News, November 4, 2026
- Met makes one arrest every 35 minutes during live facial recognition pilot, Metropolitan Police, May 13, 2026
- Live Facial Recognition Technology, Western Australia Police Force, updated November 2, 2026
- Police use facial recognition to scan one million faces in WA trial leading to 122 arrests, The Guardian, November 2, 2026
- Met police hails LFR after record year for arrests, The Register, November 3, 2025
- Western Australia live facial recognition trial results: 1.4M faces, 122 arrests, Biometric Update, November 4, 2026
- England: Police use of facial recognition technology growing rapidly, Statewatch, June 12, 2026
Header image: chart by MACCUS, from figures published by the Metropolitan Police (May 2026, and its 2025 annual report as reported by The Register) and the Western Australia Police Force (November 2026)
