Corsight AI in policing
Every deployment of Corsight AI technology by a law enforcement or justice body currently recorded on the tracker, across 1 country. Each entry is tied to a published source and carries the date it was last checked.
A deployment can involve more than one supplier. This page indexes entries where Corsight AI is the principal named supplier; the full vendor detail on each entry below remains the fuller answer.
Deployments
UK Essex Police Live Facial Recognition Operational
- Legal basis
- Not specified in source; subject to an ICO compliance audit
- Oversight
- ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) -- audited as part of a five-force programme
Essex Police has used live facial recognition since summer 2024, supplied by Corsight AI (Apollo 4) with Digital Barriers. The force paused deployments in March 2026 after two independent evaluations it had itself commissioned, under its Public Sector Equality Duty, returned conflicting findings. 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 March 2026 pause and the conflicting evaluations above are retained deliberately. They are the most consequential facts on this record and remain true as history.
Source: Essex Police live facial recognition page; BBC News; Computer Weekly; Cambridge evaluation; NPL; ICO audit · last checked 2026-09-03