Exclusive: South Wales police figures show BAME people accounted for 24% of selected scans in 2025, despite being 7% of population
Ethnic minority people are four times more likely than their white counterparts to be chosen for some police facial scans, according to official data, sparking warnings of racial bias.
Internal figures released by South Wales police revealed that 24% of people selected by police for facial recognition checks were from ethnic minorities, despite this group making up only 7% of the area’s total population.
The force polices Wales’s largest cities – Cardiff and Swansea – and has pioneered several versions of AI-enabled facial recognition technology. The latest figures relate to police officers capturing a person’s face with a smartphone and running the image through an algorithm called “Neoface” to match it against custody mugshots and other face databases. Most scans are made because people are suspected of crimes.
Civil liberties campaigners called the ethnicity figures “alarming”. The force said they raised “concerns about disproportionality” and that it was reviewing its approach. The data relates to a full year of use in 2025 and was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian.