School of Social & Political Sciences

Live facial recognition cameras are spreading across Britain. Here is what they are, what they do, and why it matters where you live.

There are two cameras in Croydon town centre that scan the face of everyone who walks past them. Not idly recording in the background. Not just capturing a footage if something goes wrong. But actively detecting your face, turning it into digital code, and checking it against a police database. An automated process that runs in less than a second. Most are not aware that this is happening, and those that wish to opt out have no grounds to do so. This system has been up and running permanently since 2025.

Prior to permanent implementation, the advanced facial recognition system had been put into use 32 times between 2020 and 2023. This number almost tripled from January to August of 2024, with 117 documented uses.

The Metropolitan Police installed the first fixed live facial recognition cameras in the UK on North End and London Road in Croydon, bolted to lampposts and buildings in a busy shopping area. As of March 2026, 13 police forces across England and Wales have access to and actively use the technology. Others borrow it for major events or high risk situations. What began as sporadic tests has quietly become something much bigger. This was not gradual integration, but rapid acceleration without public debate.

Parliament never voted. Nobody announced it. It just happened.

This raises a question bigger than privacy: who gave the state permission to do this?

Big decisions about state surveillance have always gone through Parliament. Live facial recognition has not. It has grown through police decisions, not laws. As the House of Commons Library and POST both confirm, there is no specific legal framework governing its use. Laws are supposed to shape what the police can do. Here, the technology arrived first and the law is trying to catch up.

Scotland, however, has handled this differently. Although Scotland's police announced plans to use these cameras, they intend to put a proper legal framework in place first, with parliamentary oversight, before any cameras go up. The Scottish Biometrics Commissioner has set binding rules on how police can use facial recognition. So why has the equivalent post in England been empty since 2024? And why is there no equivalent law?

What is happening in England today is a preview of what could happen anywhere.

The numbers behind the headlines

Since its implementation, Metropolitan police have attributed 2,100 arrests to facial recognition. These included violent offenders and sexual predators, the police say it keeps people safe. This was then taken a step further with a 2026 High Court ruling which states that the technology is not in violation of human rights laws. According to the police, the matter is settled.

The matter is not settled, and the numbers raise doubts; In Croydon in 2024, police scanned 128,518 faces and made 133 arrests. Across London, nearly two million faces were scanned for 804 arrests. An arrest rate of approximately 0.04%. Two million people going about their day, buying lunch, picking up their kids, just passing through, had their faces unknowingly and unwillingly cross-checked by police systems. The arrests are real. But so is the surveillance of everyone else.

There is also the crucial question of what happens when the system gets it wrong. The risks are not evenly distributed, and many innocent individuals could be subject to false circumstantial evidence against them, as well as unjust racial profiling.

Government research published in 2025 found that the technology misidentifies Black and Asian people at higher rates than white people. In one test, Black women were the most likely group to be wrongly matched, at a rate of 9.9%.

These biases have real consequences. In February 2024, Shaun Thompson, a Black anti knife-crime volunteer, was wrongly flagged by facial recognition. Officers asked for his fingerprints. His bank cards and passport were not enough to convince them the system had made a mistake. He described the process as “stop and search on steroids.” He is right. And he is almost certainly not the last.

More than half of all facial recognition deployments in London in 2024 were in areas with higher Black and minority group occupant concentrations. These included Croydon, Lewisham, and Haringey. Amnesty International has warned Parliament that using biased technology in places riddled with pre-existing racial discrimination will only make things worse. The deployment patterns suggest that this is unfortunately already underway.

Researchers who study surveillance say this was predictable. David Lyon calls this “social sorting”, surveillance systems do not just watch people equally, they classify them and treat them differently based on that classification. When the underlying data already reflects racial bias, the sorting produces racially unequal outcomes. Fixing the algorithm does not fix the sorting logic.

Ruha Benjamin points out that systems like this are hardest to challenge when they portray a neutral facade. A camera does not look prejudiced. It looks like a lamp post. When discrimination is built into a technical sorting system rather than a human led decision, the law struggles with prosecuting it, as the High Court ruling showed.

The Ada Lovelace Institute argues that the answer to these issues lies within establishing rules. It suggests that independent checks and pre-approval criteria for access can render the technology acceptable. These rules do not exist in England or Wales.

The missing legal framework

There is currently no law in the UK that governs how police can use facial recognition. None. The only evident safe-stop appears to be a patchwork framework of older data protection and equality laws.

The EU did things differently. Under its Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024, facial recognition in public spaces became heavily restricted. It can only be used in serious cases and requires approval from an independent authority before each use.

A government consultation on creating rules only began in December 2025, but by then, the cameras were already up and running. Civil liberties groups have warned that England and Wales risk becoming an outlier amongst democracies.

The public debate

The debate is often framed as safety versus privacy. But that’s an oversimplification. The real question is this: should the state be allowed to run a mass surveillance system on millions of people who have done nothing wrong, using technology that is systemically biased against certain groups, with no dedicated or protective laws, with low justice and anti-crime benefits, and without the public’s awareness?

The answer should certainly not depend on which city you happen to live in.

UK’s Parliament needs to pass a proper law. Not recommendations, not guidances, not codes of practice. A clear-cut robust law that defines boundaries of access, mandates preapproval processes, and requires that evidence is independently verified before any action is taken against an individual. For all judicial usages of these systems, rigid measures should be in place to not only establish guilt, but to also carry out repercussions with resulting false accusations. It is of utmost importance to ensure that these systems undergo regular audits and updates to address known problems. All preferably in partnership with independent oversight entities. The Scottish Parliament should focus on building that framework, before the technology arrives.

Shaun Thompson spends his time trying to get knives off London’s streets. In February 2024, a camera decided he looked like a criminal. That is what the current system produces. The question is not whether this technology will come to your area, but whether you could be next. Could you be misidentified? Are there rules to protect you? Will you be aware that biometric systems are up and running?

Write to your MP or MSP. Ask them what the legal framework is for the cameras on your lampposts. Ask the questions, before you’re questioned.

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This blog is part of the SPS Student Academic Blog series. You can read more contributions from the series here.

First published: 2 July 2026