Live Facial Recognition (LFR)
Benefits
The technology enables officers to target and locate wanted criminals and suspects for serious crimes including sex offences, violent assaults, homicide and serious and organised crime. The Metropolitan Police reported 580 arrests in 12 months using LFR, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions. South Wales Police reports no false alerts since August 2019 and multiple arrests linked to LFR use.
Details
- Tool name
- Live Facial Recognition (LFR)
- Organisation
- UK Government
- Status
- live
- AI method (as recorded)
- Computer Vision, Other
- AI method (normalised tags)
- Computer Vision Other
- Usecase
- Security and Monitoring
- Origin
- gov.uk
- Owning team
- Home Office
- Date added
- 13 August 2025
- Scrape date
- Source note
- The UK Government is rolling out 10 new Live Facial Recognition (LFR) vans to seven police forces across England and Wales. The technology has been independently tested for bias by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), finding the algorithm accurate with no bias for ethnicity, age or gender at the settings used by police. [Source]