What happened

Software engineer Alvi Choudhury was arrested at his home in Southampton, UK, in front of his neighbours and parents, and held in custody for nearly 10 hours for a GBP 3,000 residential burglary in Milton Keynes, 115 miles away.

However, Choudhury had never visited Milton Keynes, had a sound alibi, and cleary differed to the real suspect, who appeared roughly ten years younger and had different facial features, including no facial hair.

The incident caused real emotional distress to Choudhury and his family, damaged his reputation in his neighbourhood, and potentially jeopardised his career.

Choudhury is suing the police for wrongful arrest.

Why it happened

CCTV footage of the theft run through retrospective facial recognition software used by Thames Valley Police suggested Choudhury as a possible match. 

However, the software, supplied under a Home Office procurement from German company Cognitec, wrongly flagged Choudhury, an image of whom was already on a national police database due to a prior mistaken arrest in 2021.

The police claimed a "human visual assessment" confirmed the match. But Choudhury noted that officers later admitted he looked nothing like the CCTV footage, suggesting that the "automation bias" led officers to trust the software over their own eyes.

Questions have also been raised about the accuracy of the system, especially for Asian faces. The police reportedly admitted that the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology.” 

A UK government assessment of Cognitec’s software revealed that the police have been using outdated algorithms from 2020, and that the specific settings used by police are 100 times more likely to misidentify Asian subjects (4.0% error rate) compared to white subjects (0.04%).