Essex Police

Essex Police has used live facial recognition since summer 2024, supplied by Corsight AI (Apollo 4) with Digital Barriers. The force paused deployments after receiving the University of Cambridge report, while awaiting a second independent evaluation from the National Physical Laboratory. Both evaluations were commissioned by the force under its Public Sector Equality Duty and returned conflicting findings when published in March 2026. The pause began before March 2026: see the correction below. The University of Cambridge study, published 12 March 2026, ran a controlled field experiment with 188 volunteers during a live deployment in Chelmsford. At the operational threshold in use, the system correctly identified roughly half of watchlist subjects who passed the cameras. It found the system more likely to correctly identify men than women, and statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify Black participants than participants of other ethnicities. The direction of that finding is worth stating precisely, because it is the opposite of the usual concern: the disparity was in the CORRECT identification rate, not the false positive rate. Of six false positives observed, four involved Black individuals, but the researchers described this as suggestive rather than conclusive given the small number of events. Separate National Physical Laboratory testing of Corsight Apollo 4, also published March 2026, found a true positive rate of 89% and a false positive rate of 0.017% against an 18,000-image watchlist, and reported no statistically significant demographic bias. The two studies do not agree, and this entry records that rather than picking one. A force impact assessment covering more than 40 deployments between August 2024 and February 2025 reported approximately 1.3 million faces scanned, 123 interventions, 48 arrests and one confirmed mistaken intervention. Essex Police said it decided to pause deployments while working with the algorithm provider to review results and update the software. The pause was disclosed through the ICO’s audit of the force. Deployments have since resumed. The force’s own live facial recognition page, read on 3 September 2026, states that Essex Police “have been deploying Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology since summer 2024”, carries no reference to a pause, and publishes deployment results running to 16 August 2026 — most recently at Tendring, where 6,061 faces were scanned, producing one positive alert, one intervention and no incorrect alerts. The date deployments restarted is not established. The force page presents an unbroken account of use since 2024 rather than recording the suspension and its end, so the resumption can be dated only to somewhere between March and August 2026. Secondary reporting gives figures for the period after resumption but was not checked against a force publication and is not relied on here. The pause and the conflicting evaluations above are retained deliberately. They are the most consequential facts on this record and remain true as history.

Update, October 2026. Essex Police announced in March 2026 that it would resume deployments after a study identified accuracy and bias risks, revised its policies and applied a software update (BBC, reported 20 March 2026). Deployments continued through October 2026, including Basildon on 24 October and Clacton on 26 October, and the force lends its vehicles and equipment to Kent Police under joint working arrangements.

Correction and update, November 2026. The record previously dated the pause to March 2026; the sources read do not support that. The ICO's blog of 17 March 2026 states that before its audit Essex Police had paused live facial recognition after identifying potential accuracy and bias risks, so the pause began before the audit and became public in March 2026. Biometric Update (28 July 2026) says deployments were "paused for an ICO audit last August", that is August 2025, and that redeployment began in April 2026; its post-resumption figures come from a Corsight announcement. No force publication read dates the pause. Essex's undated page on algorithm performance and threshold setting says the force paused after receiving the Cambridge report while awaiting the National Physical Laboratory study, which arrived about three months later; that the Police Chief Scientific Adviser advised that the results did not support a threshold above 55; and that it has made over 120 arrests since August 2024. The force's live facial recognition page names no statutory power for the deployments (see legal basis), and its totals do not reconcile (the text gives four false positive alerts across 76 deployments, the results table shows none), so no force figures are repeated here. The ICO's Essex executive summary and its outcomes report of 18 August 2026 could not be read in this review, so no ICO rating is recorded.