Met Police to keep using facial recognition on prolific shoplifters

Police are going to start using facial recognition to track down shoplifters

The Metropolitan Police plans to use facial recognition technology going forward to try to identify and arrest London's most prolific shoplifters.

The technology maps facial features from CCTV stills against custody images in about 60 seconds.

So far, 149 suspects have been identified from 302 CCTV stills with some wanted for multiple offences.

The Met wrote to 12 leading London retailers asking for CCTV images of their top 30 unidentified offenders.

Retail crime is responsible for the loss of an estimated £1.9bn in revenue in the UK each year, causing more than 1,000 reported cases of abuse and violence against staff annually, the Met say.However, Rob Blackie, Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate, has labelled the rollout as "worrying" as the technology "has such a high error rate for ethnic minorities".

He added: "There is a real danger that many black Londoners will be wrongly stopped, and that this will further undermine trust in the police."

Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: "The results we've seen so far are game-changing. The use of facial recognition in this way could revolutionise how we investigate and solve crime."What's most powerful is what we've learned about those involved in this offending so far.

• Warning over face recognition to catch shoplifters

"It's clear the majority are career criminals involved in serious crime. This data and information helps us focus our efforts in an even more precise way than we originally anticipated."

He added: "The scale of business crime in London is huge. To be successful, we have to be precise in our approach and this is a really promising step forward."

The Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, called it an "important step forward" but said the Met needed to "go much further to crack down on crimes like these in London" and added that, if elected, she would "set up specialist units within the Met focused specifically on tackling burglaries, robberies and thefts".

A spokesperson for the mayor of London said: "Technology is a really important tool to support the Met's work to tackle all crime, but it is equally important that the Met Police are open and transparent about exactly how, where, and when it is used in order to retain the trust of all Londoners.

"The use of facial recognition technology - which is retrospective not live - is one tool in a much larger package of measures being used by the police to bear down on retail crime and violence against shop-workers and help make London safer for everyone."

Earlier this year, the Met began to use the technology to arrest dangerous and predatory offenders of violence against women and girls.

It showed that 100 offenders were responsible for a disproportionate amount of offences across the capital.

Every suspect that was a match on the force's system had previously been arrested and taken into custody for crimes such as drug possession and supply, sexual offences, burglary, violence and firearms possession.

This story has been updated to say that retail crime is responsible for the loss of an estimated £1.9bn in revenue in the UK each year. The article previously said this figure was for London alone, as the Metropolitan Police initially stated in error.

Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to [e-mail]