Rowley rejects calls for facial recognition to be dropped from carnival

The Metropolitan police commissioner has hit back at demands to drop the use of live facial recognition cameras at this weekend's Notting Hill carnival over concerns of racial bias and an impending legal challenge.

- Rajeev Syal

Mark Rowley wrote in a letter that the technology would be used at Europe's biggest street carnival "in a non-discriminatory way" using an algorithm that "does not perform in a way which exhibits bias".

He was responding to a letter from 11 anti-racist and civil liberty organisations, disclosed in the Guardian, that urged the Met to scrap the use of the technology at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community.

The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch were among those that claimed in the letter to Rowley on Saturday that the technology "will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force".

Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to "self-regulate" their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology's algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women.