"The courts have confirmed our approach is lawful. The public supports its use. It works. And it helps us keep Londoners safe." Sir Mark Rowley's declaration framed the High Court judgment this week that the Metropolitan Police Service's (MPS) use of live facial recognition (LFR) may continue across London.
High Court ruling: judges and legal reasoning
Two judges — Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey — concluded that LFR technology itself does not breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) articles asserted by the claimant. The case, brought by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch on behalf of Shaun Thompson, argued that the Met's LFR policy violated articles 8, 10 and 11 of the ECHR. The High Court found that Thompson's own privacy rights were not infringed and that the Met's planned use of LFR is "in accordance with and prescribed by the law," taking into account the Human Rights Act 1998 and Strasbourg jurisprudence.
The Metropolitan Police's claims and deployments
The Met framed the judgment as a "significant and important victory for public safety." It says LFR is transformational for policing and has produced measurable operational results: the force claims more than 2,100 arrests since 2024 linked to LFR deployments, with 24 percent of those arrests related to violent crimes against women and girls. The Met also asserts that more than 100 sex offenders were arrested "off the back of LFR," and that identifications have potentially prevented further sex attacks against vulnerable children.
Shaun Thompson, Big Brother Watch, and the planned appeal
The legal challenge centered on a concrete incident in Croydon in which Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife crime campaigner and youth worker, was falsely identified as a criminal suspect by an LFR camera. Thompson described being "misidentified, detained, and threatened with arrest," and told the court he had complied with police but that bank cards and a passport did not convince officers the system was wrong. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo called the High Court's judgment "disappointing." Thompson has stated he will appeal the decision to "protect Londoners from facial recognition being used for mass surveillance."
Performance data: false positives, demographic patterns, and testing
The reporting cites both the Met's published numbers and independent testing bodies. The Met's most recent annual review claimed an overall false positive rate of 0.0003 percent across 3,147,436 faces scanned. When measured against the number of alerts the cameras produced (2,077 alerts), that false positive rate rises to 0.48 percent. Of the false positives identified, the report says 80 percent were made on Black people.
The National Physical Laboratory carries out independent assessments that the Met references before deployments. The Register's coverage noted the Met's tendency to frame test results positively. The reporting also states that higher false positive rates for Black people have been evident since at least 2020. The Met's report attempted to minimize these disparities in tone, stating: "Overall, the system's performance remains in line with expectations, and any demographic imbalances observed are not statistically significant. This will remain under careful review."
What this means for the Met, the UK government, and Londoners
- The Metropolitan Police: The judgment clears a legal barrier to ongoing and expanded LFR use. The Met's public statements emphasize that policing must keep pace with technological change and that the question is "no longer whether we should use Live Facial Recognition - it's why we would choose not to."
- The UK government and Parliament: The reporting states the government is approving wider deployments of LFR-equipped vans and permanent systems, and that "Government and Parliament will want to carefully consider how they continue to enable, rather than over‑regulate, the use of technologies" — language attributed to the Met's commissioner in response to the judgment.
- Londoners and civil liberties groups: The case illustrates practical risks of misidentification and the human consequences Thompson described — detention and threats of arrest. Big Brother Watch has signalled continued legal challenge through appeal, and individual experiences like Thompson's remain central to the debate over LFR's reach and reliability.
The High Court decision clears a path for the Met to continue and expand LFR in London, backed by asserted operational results and supportive laboratory testing. Yet the decision also leaves intact the contested statistics on demographic imbalances and the concrete prospect of further legal challenge: Shaun Thompson has said he will appeal, and the government and Parliament are explicitly invited — by the Met's own remarks — to weigh how policy should shape deployment going forward.
