Met Police LFR at Notting Hill Carnival (2016)
The Metropolitan Police ran its first live facial recognition trial at London's Notting Hill Carnival, scanning roughly 500,000 faces against a watchlist of suspects. The system produced no arrests from its matches.
The Met reported no successful identifications from the first large-scale public trial of the technology in Britain.
It became an early example of high-volume scanning with minimal output, a pattern that has recurred in later Met and BTP deployments.
A near-identical ratio of scans to results appears in the BTP trial a decade later, underscoring recurring questions about facial recognition's real-world effectiveness.
