In June 2024, at the first ‘Biometrics in Criminal Justice’ conference in Scotland, the Chair of the Scottish Police Authority – together with Police Scotland, the Scottish Police Authority, and the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner – launched what they collectively termed a ‘national conversation’ on the use of live facial recognition (LFR) in Scotland. Chief Constable Jo Farrell told attendees of the conference (which was co-hosted by Police Scotland, the country’s centralised national police force): ‘Policing has a positive duty to use biometric data and new technology to safeguard the vulnerable and bring offenders to justice’. She added: ‘Today’s event is about […] continuing a public conversation which explores the opportunities and challenges future technologies hold for policing and to ensure we maintain and develop the strong ethical basis for our use of biometric data’ (emphasis added). Earlier this month (April 2025), in a proclaimed effort to continue the ‘conversation’ about LFR, Police Scotland announced a public survey on the potential use of the technology. ‘This isn’t a consultation’, Police Scotland’s website insists, ‘It is an ongoing public conversation’.
What is LFR?
There are several types of facial recognition technology in use by police forces across the globe: ‘retrospective’, ‘live’, and ‘operator-initiated’ facial recognition. All three use an algorithm that attempts to match images of faces with those on an existing database of faces or ‘watchlist’. ‘Retrospective’ facial recognition uses faces of people in photos and videos (for example, in CCTV footage), while ‘operator-initiated’ facial recognition enables police officers to take a photograph of someone’s face and instantly match the image with those on their watchlist. ‘Live’ facial recognition, as the name suggests, uses special cameras set up by the police to scan faces in real time – such as those of people simply walking down the street – and to compare them against the watchlist. As civil liberties group Big Brother Watch puts it, LFR works ‘by creating a “faceprint” of everyone who passes in front of camera – processing biometric data as sensitive as a fingerprint, often without our knowledge or consent’.
In simple terms, faces are ‘matched’ to those on a watchlist through artificial intelligence (AI) software that creates a unique ‘map’ of an individual face, which is expressed in the form of a numerical code. An algorithm compares these codes to those on the watchlist and produces a list of potential matches (those which reach a sufficient threshold of similarity). The images on the watchlist or database used by police can come from a variety of sources, including from the Police National Database (PND), as well as from publicly available images and information (see Big Brother Watch’s recent report, ‘Biometric Britain’, for a detailed breakdown of how the technology works).
Facial recognition technology in Scotland
As it currently stands, Police Scotland does not use LFR – unlike its southern counterparts in England and Wales*. There is no legislative basis for the use of LFR in Scotland – nor is there a robust legal foundation for the use of LFR in England and Wales, where police forces’ ongoing use of the technology relies upon a shaky common law basis: the idea that the police have a general duty under common law to detect and prevent crime (as described in the Bridges case).
In 2017, Police Scotland indicated an ambition to introduce LFR by 2026 as part of their 10-year strategy, ‘Policing 2026’. Three years later, however, the organisation confirmed that there were no plans to introduce the technology in the near future, after a report by the Justice Sub-Committee on Policing stated that there was ‘no justifiable basis for Police Scotland to invest in this technology’, describing the potential use of LFR as ‘a radical departure from Police Scotland’s fundamental principle of policing by consent’.
Although the force is yet to make use of LFR, Police Scotland has previously attracted controversy for its use of retrospective facial recognition (RFR), and in 2023 it was reported that the force’s use of this tech had tripled within a five-year period. Just last month (March 2025), it emerged that an assessment of the reliability, efficacy, and fairness of Police Scotland’s use of RFR was impossible due to a lack of meaningful data collection. A Joint Assurance Review published in March by the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) found that Police Scotland ‘does not collect, store, or analyse specific data to evaluate how effective the PND facial search system is […] There is extraordinarily little data and insights collected systematically to help monitor performance, identify issues, and inform decision-making’.
Pushing back against the introduction of LFR in Scotland
Over the last decade, campaigners, community groups, academics, and politicians alike have highlighted the dangers of the use (and increased use) of LFR in policing across the UK. Not only is there little evidence to suggest that the technology is reliable or effective in relation to its ostensible crime-fighting purposes, LFR is alarmingly unregulated in legal terms, has been found to amplify and entrench discriminatory policing – particularly in regard to women and racially minoritised communities, is likely to have a chilling effect on individuals’ ECHR rights and freedoms, and clearly goes against the purportedly fundamental principles of ‘policing by consent’ and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ – instead treating everyone who passes by LFR cameras ‘as a potential suspect’.
Given the severity of the issues (and the absence of credible responses or solutions by policing bodies) that have arisen where LFR has been introduced in other parts of the UK – most notably by the Metropolitan Police in London – and the fact that Police Scotland cannot be trusted to monitor their current use of facial recognition technology (as confirmed by last month’s Joint Assurance Review), it is imperative that we voice our unwavering opposition to the introduction of LFR in Scotland.
The question is, will Police Scotland listen? Despite efforts to make the ‘potential’ introduction of LFR seem like a democratic and thoughtful process – as evidenced by language emphasising ‘exploratory conversation’ and survey questions that ask to what extent respondents might be ‘comfortable’ with police use of LFR – there is no guarantee that a lack of public support would prevent Police Scotland from pursuing the implementation of this technology in the future. (Moreover, the fact that the survey is open for less than four weeks does not inspire confidence that this is something that Police Scotland intend to take seriously.) As we often see with various ‘innovations’ in policing more generally, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Police Scotland solicits public views on LFR, despite intentions to implement the technology regardless – especially if we think back to the remarks made by the Chief Constable last summer (in which she claimed that the police have a ‘positive duty’ to pursue the use of new technology and biometric data). Police Scotland’s £13 million 2024 deal with US company Motorola Solutions for body-worn cameras and its consideration of Israeli surveillance firm BriefCam’s ‘enhanced search software’ shows that the organisation is not averse to spending serious sums of money on new police tech, despite financial pressures across public services.
As to whether Police Scotland really is committed to opening up an honest ‘conversation’ about LFR, or whether this survey is merely the beginning of a process that aims to lay the foundations for the rollout of a potentially dangerous, discriminatory, and disproportionate technology – that remains to be seen.
* The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) says it does not use LFR (PSNI, 2021; House of Commons Library, 2024).
By Holly Bird, StopWatch volunteer
All blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of StopWatch UK.