Incident 692: London Metropolitan Police's Facial Recognition Technology Reportedly Misidentified Shaun Thompson as Suspect Leading to Arrest

Description: Sometime in February 2024, Shaun Thompson is reported to have walked by one of the London Metropolitan Police's facial recognition technology vans near London Bridge. He was almost immediately arrested because the technology is reported to have misidentified him as a suspect in an unrelated and unspecified crime.

Editor Notes: Incidents 691 and 692 are paired together in the reporting, but they are two separate, discrete harm events. I have created distinct incident IDs for each while replicating the reporting for each one. The incident date of 2/1/2024 gestures toward the fact that we seem only to have "sometime in February" as the date of Shaun Thompson's misidentification and arrest.

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Alleged: Metropolitan Police Service developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Shaun Thompson and General public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

692

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-02-01

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

'I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech'

bbc.com

Innocent woman branded a shoplifter by facial recognition software

thetimes.co.uk

bbc.com · 2024

Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store.

"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."

S…

thetimes.co.uk · 2024

Shoppers have been warned that facial recognition software used by stores is wrongly identifying some innocent customers as thieves.

A woman said that an employee at Home Bargains, the variety store chain, accused her of being a shoplifter …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.