Ever since the Macpherson Report of 1999, the police have been working extremely hard to reassure us that they’re not “institutionally racist”. Unfortunately, though, they’ve just hit an unexpected snag.
It seems that, quite unwittingly, they’ve been using racist cameras.
In recent years, police forces have taken to catching suspects using a technology known as LFR (live facial recognition). This week, however, police in Essex said they’d suspended its use after academics found that the LFR cameras were “statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify” people who are black than people who aren’t. The finding has given rise to fears that the technology is racially biased.
