Research and analysis - Public attitudes to police use of facial recognition technology

Product Description

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that aims to help the police solve and prevent crime, bring offenders to justice and keep people safe. The Police use of facial recognition factsheet (Home Office, 2023) provides more details on the 3 types of FRT that police in England and Wales
can currently use:

retrospective facial recognition (RFR)

live facial recognition (LFR)

operator-initiated facial recognition (OIFR)

Of these, RFR is the most widely used, with all police forces in England and Wales being able to conduct RFR searches through the Police National Database (PND). RFR analyses images of unknown individuals (for example, images taken from CCTV or mobile phone footage) after an event or incident has occurred and compares them to custody images held by the police. LFR is less widely used in policing in England and Wales. LFR analyses live video footage of people passing a camera and compares this to a bespoke watchlist of police images to quickly locate wanted criminals or vulnerable people who may need police assistance. OIFR is the newest FRT capability. It allows officers, after engaging with a person of interest, to photograph them on a mobile phone and help check their identity against a police database of images without the need to take them into custody first.

To understand public attitudes towards the use of FRT in policing, the Home Office commissioned a survey on Attitudes to facial recognition technology in policing in January 2025 to residents in England and Wales.

The primary aims of the survey were:

• to understand public attitudes towards police use of FRT in general, and in relation to the different types, contexts and uses of FRT
• to identify the perceived benefits and concerns with the use of FRT in policing
• to understand whether attitudes towards police use of FRT differ between sociodemographic groups

This publication reports the survey’s headline findings but does not include an analysis of all questions posed to participants. Further analysis of the entire dataset is ongoing, and a fuller publication will follow.

This report includes any preliminary analysis indicating statistically significant differences between sociodemographic groups in the main body of text. However, note that any descriptive differences reported here do not suggest that certain demographic characteristics determine or cause attitudes. Instead, other variables may better explain the reported differences between sociodemographic groups.