NEC in policing

Legal basis

Common law policing powers; DPA 2018 Part 3

Oversight

Force pilot evaluation, due to report after the pilot ends in November 2026

A time-limited trial running from February 2026 to November 2026, first deployed at London Bridge and extended to the London Underground with a deployment at Victoria station on 11 August 2026. The effectiveness evidence here is the most striking thing about this entry, and stands in sharp contrast to the Metropolitan Police's figures for the same technology family. Across 18 deployments between February and July 2026, British Transport Police logged more than 530,000 faces scanned, zero true matches, no arrests attributable to LFR, and one confirmed false alert at King's Cross on 24 February. The Met, by comparison, reported 173 arrests from roughly 470,000 faces at Croydon over a broadly comparable period. That divergence is worth recording plainly rather than resolving: the same class of technology, deployed by two forces in the same country in the same year, has produced radically different yields. Watchlist composition and deployment siting are the obvious candidate explanations, but neither force has published enough for that to be more than inference. The identification of the engine as NEC NeoFace M40 rests on secondary reporting rather than a BTP or NEC primary document.

Source: British Transport Police published information on its LFR pilot · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

No dedicated statute. Governing authority is now R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (High Court, 21 April 2026), read with R (Bridges) v South Wales Police (Court of Appeal, 2020).

Oversight

Force LFR policy documents; ICO engagement

In Thompson the High Court dismissed a judicial review brought by Shaun Thompson and Big Brother Watch's Silkie Carlo, upholding the Met's 2024 LFR policy as lawful and compatible with Article 8 and data protection law. Any account of UK live facial recognition citing only Bridges is now stale. Deployed at targeted operations rather than continuously, with published deployment records and arrest figures. The force says it has arrested more than 2,000 people using LFR since the start of 2024. The deployment model is changing materially. The Croydon fixed-camera pilot, running October 2025 to May 2026, produced 173 arrests from more than 470,000 passers-by with one false alert on the Met's own figures. In June 2026 the Met confirmed fixed LFR cameras would be installed in the West End and Soho before the end of 2026, with six further areas during 2027, and in August 2026 the Mayor of London indicated the Oxford Street cameras would become permanent. This is a shift from mobile, targeted, time-limited deployments towards standing infrastructure, and is arguably a more significant development than any single deployment figure. Use is spreading nationally: Statewatch's June 2026 survey recorded 12 forces using LFR, with trade reporting citing 13 of 43; treat the figure as at least 12 to 13 forces as of mid-2026 and rising. The Home Office announced 40 additional LFR vans in January 2026. First protest use came in May 2026. An investigation by Liberty Investigates and The Times found children had featured at least 1,600 times on live facial recognition watchlists across six forces, including children as young as 12; the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights has formally questioned the Home Secretary about it. Research by London Assembly Member Zoe Garbett found over half of London deployments took place in areas with a higher proportion of Black residents than the city average. Static deployment, September 2026. On 3 September 2026 the Westminster Central West BCU announced on its own X account that it was deploying live facial recognition to crime hotspots in Westminster borough that day. Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said cameras will be fitted across the West End and Soho by the end of 2026. These are static during deployments and attached to street furniture rather than van-mounted, though movable between deployments. It follows a six-month Croydon pilot the Met says ran October 2025 to March 2026, producing 173 arrests across 24 operations. In April 2026 the High Court dismissed a judicial review of the Met's facial recognition policy in R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, finding the specific policy compatible with the relevant human rights requirements. The judgment is subject to a proposed appeal. Biometrics commissioners warned in May 2026 that dedicated legislation could still be three years away, and the February 2026 Home Office consultation had produced no published outcome by September.

Source: Metropolitan Police; IBTimes UK; Liberty Investigates and The Times; London Assembly · last checked 2026-09-07

Legal basis

Common law; considered in R (Bridges) v South Wales Police

Oversight

Court of Appeal judgment 2020 required changes to policy

Deployed for public events including Six Nations rugby fixtures, with continued operations through 2026 including the Swansea Airshow in July 2026 and deployments in Cardiff and Pontypridd in June and July 2026. R (Bridges) v South Wales Police remains the governing appellate authority on this force's use and has not been disturbed. The force has spent roughly £3.5m on the programme, with false alert rates falling over time on its own figures. Separately, South Wales Police has trained over 500 officers to use a handheld facial recognition mobile app, making it a significant operator-initiated facial recognition deployment as well as a live one. The Liberty Investigates and Times investigation into children on facial recognition watchlists found South Wales Police had placed 632 people under 18 on its watchlists since 2022, including six children under 13. The force's own guidance states no one under 13 should be included, and the College of Policing notes the technology performs less reliably on younger children.

Source: R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police [2020] EWCA Civ 1058 · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

No dedicated Canadian federal statute governing police facial recognition

Oversight

Not disclosed in available reporting

Toronto Police Service uses NEC's NeoFace Reveal to compare an image obtained during a criminal investigation against lawfully obtained booking photographs. Candidate images are reviewed by a trained facial recognition analyst before being supplied to investigators for further review. This entry was previously classified on this tracker as live facial recognition. That was wrong, and the correction matters beyond this single entry: retrospective image-to-mugshot searching and live scanning of passers-by are different technologies with different legal and civil liberties profiles, and conflating them inflates the apparent scale of live facial recognition deployment. The force's own published AI inventory identifies NeoFace Reveal as a high-risk AI technology, and Toronto operates an AI governance framework through the Toronto Police Services Board.

Source: Biometric Update · last checked 2026-08-27

Legal basis

No national biometric surveillance framework exists in Australia. Western Australia's Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing Act 2024 is the first Australian law directly governing personal information in automated decision-making.

Oversight

State privacy watchdog was not consulted before the trial launched, according to advocacy groups

Western Australia Police became the first Australian law enforcement agency to use live facial recognition on the public when its five-month trial began on 22 June 2026, using NEC's NeoFace M40 from cameras mounted on marked police vans in Perth and Fremantle. Figures from the first week of the trial: more than 130,000 faces scanned, generating 33 alerts, leading to 18 arrests and two false alerts. Those numbers are worth reading in both directions. Two false alerts against 130,000 faces is a low error rate. It is also 130,000 people whose faces were converted to biometric templates in seven days so that 18 arrests could be made, and whether that ratio is proportionate is a policy question rather than a technical one that a more accurate algorithm resolves. Associate Professor Jake Goldenfein of Melbourne Law School has noted the established concern that these systems have historically performed less accurately for people of colour and for women, and least accurately for women of colour, because of the composition of the data the algorithms were trained on. WA Police has pointed to National Physical Laboratory testing of the NEC algorithm in selecting the technology. The trial has been criticised by privacy experts and legal advocates, and is being watched by other Australian forces as a precedent.

Source: ABC News; eWeek; Biometric Update · last checked 2026-08-28

Legal basis

Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Human Rights Act 1998, Equality Act 2010, UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, as cited by the forces. No dedicated statutory basis.

Oversight

Deployments authorised at superintendent rank or above. Both forces publish a deployment register, and Sussex additionally publishes its standard operating procedure. Deployments are notified at least seven days in advance.

A single joint programme rather than two separate deployments: the forces describe "a joint bid to obtain two live facial recognition (LFR) vans", funded by the Home Office, and record it as one shared capability. Entered here as one record to avoid counting two shared vans as two deployments. The forces publish a running deployment register covering Redhill, Staines, Camberley, Ashford, Epsom, Woking and Guildford. The start year is deliberately left empty. Two readings of the same force register produced different dates for the first deployment at Redhill town centre — 13 November 2025 and 23 January 2026 — and the discrepancy was not resolved. The register itself should settle it before this field is filled. NEC Software is named by the forces in describing the Home Office-commissioned testing of the technology, which identifies the supplier but is not a separate procurement record.

Source: Surrey Police and Sussex Police live facial recognition pages, with published deployment registers · last checked 2026-09-04