Ethnic minority groups in Wales four times more likely to be target of police facial scans

Ethnic minority people are four times more likely than their white counterparts to be chosen for some police facial scans, according to official data, sparking warnings of racial bias.

Internal figures released by South Wales police revealed that 24% of people selected by police for facial recognition checks were from ethnic minorities, despite this group making up only 7% of the area’s total population.

The force polices Wales’s largest cities – Cardiff and Swansea – and has pioneered several versions of AI-enabled facial recognition technology. The latest figures relate to police officers capturing a person’s face with a smartphone and running the image through an algorithm called “Neoface” to match it against custody mugshots and other face databases. Most scans are made because people are suspected of crimes.

Civil liberties campaigners called the ethnicity figures “alarming”. The force said they raised “concerns about disproportionality” and that it was reviewing its approach. The data relates to a full year of use in 2025 and was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian. Even when compared with arrest data for the police area, in which 11% of people arrested are from ethnic minorities, the face-scan figures appear disproportionate.

South Wales is one of the first UK constabularies to routinely use this “officer-initiated facial recognition” (OIFR) technology, which aims to identify suspects, wanted criminals and missing people who decline to give their details when challenged as well as people who are found unconscious, uncommunicative or dead. A similar system is being trialled by the Metropolitan police in London and has also been tested in Liverpool.

Critics have called facial recognition tools “Orwellian” and there have been repeated concerns about algorithmic bias putting ethnic minorities at greater risk of wrongful arrest. Last week, the police watchdog warned that innocent people, especially from ethnic minorities, remained at risk of wrongful arrest if police treated inaccurate retrospective facial recognition data as evidence.

But advocates – including the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood – believe facial recognition is the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since fingerprints and DNA matching. Other versions of the technology include live facial recognition cameras directed from marked vans and cameras fixed to lamp-posts, like those piloted in Croydon between October 2025 and March 2026, which led to 173 arrests, including of rape, kidnap and sexual assault suspects.

“This data shows that intrusive biometric tools are being used to disproportionately target minority communities,” said Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties campaign that obtained the figures. “It is alarming that non-white people have been subject to face scans at a much higher rate than would be expected either by the region’s demography or the makeup of people arrested in the region.”

Aliya Mohammed, the chief executive of Race Equality First, a Cardiff-based anti-discrimination organisation, said the figures raised “serious concerns about racial disproportionality”.

“Facial recognition is not neutral because it uses AI,” she said. “If existing biases influence who is stopped and scanned, technology can reinforce and even amplify inequality.”

Alvi Choudhury, 26, who was arrested in February for a burglary in a city he had never visited after police face-scanning software confused him with another person of south Asian heritage on a custody database, said it was “very concerning” that ethnic minorities were being disproportionately scanned.

“The police are under pressure to solve crimes and they are over-reliant on these AI tools,” he said. “They shouldn’t be arresting people based on the AI tools alone.”

He remained worried AI systems were not trained on enough ethnic minority faces to ensure the number of false positives was no greater than for white people.

According to the data for 2025, South Wales police officers initiated face scans of 257 adults and 14 children, including two under-10s. More than half were suspected of a crime, being unlawfully at large or breaching bail conditions. The next most common reasons were because officers believed the person posed a risk of harm to themselves or others – such as stalkers or sex offenders. In about one in 10 cases, a scan was initiated for a suspected missing person while the technology was used to identify a dead person about once a fortnight.

In many of the cases, the scan failed to deliver a match or the subject agreed to share their identity. Where a match was made, arrests followed in 48% of cases and no further action resulted in a third of cases.

A spokesperson for South Wales police said: “We recognise the figures raise concerns about disproportionality. The number of OIFR searches remains relatively small, and the use of the technology is in its infancy. That said, each deployment is based on the individual circumstances that officers are dealing with at that time and is subject to supervisory and force-wide scrutiny.”

They said the force would “continue to review our approach through our established governance processes, which also include input from independent advisory groups and external scrutiny panels” and added: “Where opportunities for learning or improvement are identified, we will take appropriate action.”

Earlier this month, the Home Office announced a new facial recognition watchdog with the power to stop police forces using the technology if they fail to follow rules and new laws in the police reform bill, including a duty for the use of face scans to be intelligence-led and proportionate.

The Home Office said decisions on the operational use of facial recognition were matters for the police, but they must comply with equality, human rights and data protection laws and its use must be necessary, proportionate and fair.