In April, the Home Office announced £115m of new funding to create the “Police.AI” centre. Its aim is to introduce a “rapid and responsible” rollout of AI tools across all 43 forces in England and Wales. The National Police Chief Council (NPCC) claims it will establish UK policing as “a global leader in applied, responsible AI”. Currently, each police force in the UK largely determines for itself how and when to procure, trial and deploy AI tools, leading to a lack of standardisation and inefficient, costlier procurement practices. This has inevitably led to concerns being raised regarding policy, ethics and accountability – and nowhere has the debate been more pointed than around the use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR). This is because LFR is already being used at scale. More than 25,000 “retrospective” facial recognition (RFR) searches are carried out per month, with images from CCTV, mobile phones, dashcams, video doorbells and social media compared against a police national database of custody mugshots. In London, between January 2024 and September 2025, over 1,300 suspects were arrested with the help of live facial recognition technology (FRT). In February, the government concluded a consultation on legislation to govern the use of the technology by police. The Home Office signalled its intentions plainly: “The consultation will pave the way for new laws so all police forces can use this new technology with greater confidence and more often.” Up to this point, police advocates have stressed that the patchwork of checks and balances in place, such as the AI covenant in policing, and the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, are sufficient for regulating the use of LFR. Critics counter that the public are being asked to rely on police assurances in what remains a legal grey area. Questions are also being raised about the