Live Facial Recognition

Live Facial Recognition helping to make the capital safer, according to new report

The Metropolitan Police Service’s use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology is making London safer, according to a new annual report published by the force on (Friday, 31 October).

The report includes in-depth analysis about the Met’s use of the tool between September 2024 and September 2025, when LFR deployments led to 962 arrests. Over a quarter of these arrests were for individuals involved in violence against women and girls, including those suspected of rape, strangulation and domestic abuse.

This brings the total number of LFR arrests to over 1400 – of which more than 1,000 people have been charged or cautioned.

These are criminals who were wanted by police or the courts, as well as offenders who were in breach of court-imposed conditions, such as sex offenders or stalkers.

These people may otherwise have remained unlawfully at large, posing a continued threat to the public and taking up much more officer time to try and locate them.

The report also demonstrates how the Met is using LFR to focus resourcing to areas where there are higher rates of crime. This is helping make those communities safe and pursue the criminals who pose the greatest risk.

Public support also remains strong, with 85% of Londoners backing the use of LFR to keep them safe.

And not only is the tool helping to reduce crime in the capital, but it’s also helping to drive trust of the force within the communities it serves – with 74% of Londoners now trusting the Met.

Lindsey Chiswick, the lead for LFR at the Met and nationally, said:

“We are proud of the results achieved with LFR. Our goal has always been to keep Londoners safe and improve the trust of our communities. Using this technology is helping us do exactly that.

“This is a powerful and game-changing tool, which is helping us to remove dangerous offenders from our streets and deliver justice for victims.

“We remain committed to being transparent and engaging with communities about our use of LFR, to demonstrate we are using it fairly and without bias.”

With an exceptionally low false alert rate of just 0.0003% from more than three million faces scanned, the technology has proven both effective and accurate.

Nobody has been arrested on the back of a false alert, with four out of the 10 people falsely alerted by the system not stopped at all. The remaining six people were all spoken to by officers for under five minutes.

Independent testing has also continued to show that the tool performs consistently across different demographic groups, with the Met also emphasising the robust safeguards in place to protect people’s rights and privacy. For example, if a member of the public walks past an LFR camera and is not wanted by the police, their biometrics are immediately and permanently deleted.

Building on this success, the Met will be scaling up its use of the technology in the coming months. The force will be increasing deployments each week, with additional support from officers and staff.