The Metropolitan Police has announced plans to expand its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London. The Met Police force is planning on having the intrusive scanning technology set up in Soho and the West End by December 2026. Over the following year, six more areas across London are slated to follow. However, civil liberties organisation Big Brother Watch has called these plans: an alarming escalation of an intrusive technology which has already scanned the faces of millions of innocent Londoners. Likewise, the privacy campaigner also highlighted the recent high-profile case of Alvi Choudhury. The young British-Asian man was mistakenly arrested due to an AI facial recognition error. This sparked conversations around the technology’s racial bias. Met Police build ‘secretive watchlists’ The Met Police has recorded over 2,000 LFR-assisted arrests since 2024. Human rights organisation Liberty explained that LFR: usually involves parking vans equipped with the tech on busy shopping streets or outside stadiums and train stations, scanning the hundreds of thousands of us who come within range of the police cameras on the vehicles’ roofs, attempting to match our faces in real time to images on secretive watchlists. According to the Met Police Commissioner, its new LFR cameras will be fixed in place on lamp-posts and similar vantage points. However, the cameras could also be repositioned if officers notice “shifts in crime patterns or tactics”. The force has already trialled similar static cameras in Croydon, marking the first such deployment in the UK. It pronounced the pilot a success, with commissioner Mark Rowley claiming that the 6-month test: delivered over 170 arrests, a reduction in crime, and a significant fall in violence against women and girls. All these results with only one false alert among hundreds of thousands of people. The technology supports officers to target wanted