HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

UK Facial Recognition System Reportedly Exhibits Higher False Positive Rates for Black and Asian Subjects

December 5, 2025

A report suggests that the UK government's facial recognition technology, under testing by police forces, exhibits disproportionately higher false positive identification rates for Black and Asian individuals compared to white subjects. Notably, Black women experienced particularly high error rates. These concerning findings emerged from an analysis of retrospective searches of the national police database. The Home Office has disclosed these results amidst plans for expanded national deployment, emphasizing the need for trustworthy AI practices.

JOIN US in shaping the future of safe and secure AI by contributing to the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern).

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
home-office, metropolitan-police, government-of-the-united-kingdom, law-enforcement, british-law-enforcement
Alleged developer
unknown-facial-recognition-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
general-public, general-public-of-the-united-kingdom, minorities-in-the-united-kingdom, black-people-in-the-united-kingdom, asian-people-in-the-united-kingdom, epistemic-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1305

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.