The Metropolitan police commissioner has hit back at demands to drop the use of live facial recognition cameras at this weekend’s Notting Hill carnival over concerns of racial bias and an impending legal challenge.
Mark Rowley wrote in a letter that the instant face-matching technology would be used at Europe’s biggest street carnival “in a non-discriminatory way” using an algorithm that “does not perform in a way which exhibits bias”.
He was responding to a letter from 11 anti-racist and civil liberty organisations, disclosed in the Guardian, that urged the Met to scrap the use of the technology at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community.
The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch were among those who claimed in the letter to Rowley on Saturday that the technology “will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force”.
Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to “self-regulate” their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology’s algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women.
The Met said last month it would deploy specially mounted cameras at entries and exits of the two-day event in west London. As many as 2 million people attend the second-biggest street festival in the world every year, held on the August bank holiday weekend.
In his letter sent to the NGOs and charities, Rowley acknowledged that previous use of the technology at the carnival in 2016 and 2017 did not build public confidence. The Met’s former facial recognition system, which has since been improved, incorrectly identified 102 people as potential suspects and led to no arrests.
“Since then, we’ve made considerable progress. The current version of the algorithm is significantly improved, has undergone independent testing and validation, and now performs to a much higher standard,” Rowley said.
He said the technology would target the “small minority” who commit serious crimes including violence and sexual offences.
In 2024 there were 349 arrests made at the event, including for homicide, rape, possession of weapons, and other violence-related and sexual offences, Rowley said.
“Together, these offences represent a threat to public safety and all those who seek to enjoy carnival safely. Our use of LFR is part of a much broader strategy to locate, disrupt, and deter the minority who pose such risks.”
Civil liberty groups have called on the Met to drop the use of LFR cameras after a high court challenge was launched last month by the anti-knife campaigner Shaun Thompson. Thompson, a Black British man, was wrongly identified by LFR as a criminal, held by police, and then faced demands from officers for his fingerprints.
Rowley’s letter did not address Thompson’s challenge but dismissed claims that the police were operating without a legal framework. “The Equality Act 2010 places a legal obligation on public authorities to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination,” he wrote, adding that the European convention on human rights, and data protection laws, also covered LFR technology.
Responding to Rowley’s letter, Rebecca Vincent, the interim director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said: “With no legislation governing live facial recognition, no governmental framework as promised by the home secretary, and a crucial judicial review pending, why the rush to accelerate use of this Orwellian technology? We’re meant to operate on the basis of ‘policing by consent’, yet no one has consented to this, and certainly not the attendees of this cultural celebration.
“We all want criminals off the streets, but turning carnival into a mass police lineup is not the way to do it.”
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