The High Court has granted an anti-knife crime community worker permission to take legal action against the Metropolitan Police after being “grossly mistreated” as a result of live facial recognition cameras wrongly flagging him as a criminal.
Last year, 39-year-old Londoner Shaun Thompson was returning home from a volunteering shift with Street Fathers, a community organisation that provides a positive male presence to young people and tackles knife crime, when he was wrongly flagged on the Metropolitan Police’s facial recognition database outside of London Bridge station. He was held by officers for almost 30 minutes, who repeatedly demanded scans of his fingerprints and threatened him with arrest, despite him showing multiple identity documents further evidencing that he was not the individual on the facial recognition database.
In the first major legal challenge against the Met’s use of live facial recognition technology, Mr Thompson is bringing the case alongside privacy campaigner and Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo. Big Brother Watch has argued that live facial recognition “makes us a nation of suspects” and has called on the government to “urgently rein in police forces’ use of this invasive technology”. The case will be heard by the High Court in January 2026.
The Metropolitan Police has been using live facial recognition sporadically in London since 2016, but has significantly increased deployments in recent years. The force was recently criticised after revealing it would be deploying the technology at Notting Hill Carnival this August, despite significant backlash when it was trialled at the event in 2016 and 2017.
Critics have raised concerns about who is added to the police’s so-called “watchlists”, which include not only suspects of crime, but victims, as well as “vulnerable persons”. Police have previously populated watchlists with protestors not wanted for any offences and people with mental health issues not suspected of any crimes.
Police use of facial recognition is not enabled by any specific piece of legislation and has not been authorised by parliament. Police forces across England and Wales have been left to write their own policies about how and where it can be used. Both the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police have announced their intentions to install permanent facial recognition cameras in city centres, in a move unheard of in democratic nations.
Earlier this month, the Home Secretary said “a proper, clear governance framework” was needed for police use of live facial recognition, and said her department was in the process of developing such a framework with stakeholders. Several parliamentary inquiries have already called for regulation of the technology, while a coalition of parliamentarians and rights groups have previously called for an urgent stop to the use of live facial recognition, citing concerns about injustice, democratic rights, and an insufficient legislative basis to monitor the public with the technology.
COMMENT
Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch and co-claimant, said:
“We’re taking the Met to court to urgently protect the public’s privacy and freedom from Orwellian live facial recognition. No laws mention facial recognition and parliament has never approved its use, yet police continue to deploy this technology in a cavalier and chilling way.
Live facial recognition surveillance makes us a nation of suspects who, as we’ve seen in Shaun’s disturbing case, can be falsely accused, grossly mistreated and forced to prove our innocence to authorities.
“Facial recognition is inaccurate and dangerously out of control in the UK. No other democracy in the world spies on its population with live facial recognition at the rate of the UK. This is the right moment for the government to urgently rein in police forces’ use of this invasive technology.”
Shaun Thompson, Street Fathers volunteer and co-claimant, said:
“I work with Street Fathers which helps the youth of London. I patrol to help keep kids safe and protected and to get knives off the streets. I was coming home from a street patrol in Croydon, when I was pulled out of the street at London Bridge due to facial recognition. They were telling me I was a wanted man, trying to get my fingerprints and trying to scare me with arrest, even though I knew and they knew the computer had got it wrong.
“Instead of working to get knives off the streets like I do, they were wasting their time with technology when they knew it had made a mistake.
“I was angry that I had been stopped by a flawed technology that misidentified me as someone else and was treated as though I was guilty.
“I’m bringing this legal challenge because I don’t want this to happen to other people. Facial recognition is like stop and search on steroids and doesn’t make communities any safer. It needs to be stopped.”
NOTES
- Big Brother Watch is crowdfunding to cover the claimants’ legal costs
- Spokespeople are available for interview. Please direct enquiries or requests for interviews to info@bigbrotherwatch.org.uk or 07730439257
- More detail on Big Brother Watch’s campaign to #StopFacialRecognition is available on our website