Audit Scorecard: Assessing police use of facial recognition

We have developed a sociotechnical audit tool to help outside stakeholders evaluate the ethics and legality of police use of facial recognition.

There have been improvements in how police use facial recognition, but more work needs to be done.

Based on our new research report and findings, we recommend regulators, civil society groups, and researchers to use our audit scorecard to scrutinise police use of facial recognition.

Developed for England and Wales, this audit extends to all types of facial recognition for identification, including live, retrospective, and mobile phone facial recognition.

We developed this audit using a review of existing literature and feedback from academia, government, civil society, and police organisations on the ethics and legality of adopting facial recognition technology.

We designed the audit based on extensive research as a tool to help:

– Reveal the risks and harms of police use of facial recognition

– Evaluate compliance with the law and national guidance

– Inform policy, advocacy, and ethics scrutiny on police use of facial recognition

Read our full report to find out more about how we developed the audit tool and the results of our test on three British police deployments – with all three failing.

The full audit scorecard is available below.

If you have any questions about using the audit, please email minderoo@crassh.cam.ac.uk