MET police rolling out facial recognition in London

Our Take

Credit to the channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency for keeping a camera on London's live facial recognition deployment by the Met Police. The pattern is familiar: a tool pitched as narrowly targeted for serious crime quietly becomes a permanent fixture on street corners, scanning every face that passes regardless of suspicion. We've watched this exact playbook play out with Flock Safety's ALPR network here in the US — pilot programs that never sunset, mission creep that nobody voted for, and vendors who profit from normalizing constant identification.

The UK and US surveillance states aren't identical, but they rhyme. Facial recognition reads faces; ALPRs read plates, but both convert public movement into a searchable, retained dataset that police and sometimes private companies can query without a warrant. Once that infrastructure exists, the justification for using it always expands past the original sales pitch. That's not paranoia, it's the documented history of nearly every mass surveillance rollout, on either side of the Atlantic.

If London is getting face-scanning cameras, your town may already have license plate cameras doing something similar. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action resources walk you through how.