Mistaken arrest victim says police were laughing

A man arrested after a mistaken image match by police has said officers laughed about the lack of resemblance and said he should not have been in custody.

Alvi Choudhury said he was detained at home in Southampton on 7 January over a burglary 80 miles (130km) away in Milton Keynes and released without charge after more than nine hours.

The BBC understands that police found an image of him on the Police National Database (PND) which they thought matched CCTV footage of the burglary suspect.

Choudhury said it was obvious to him the suspect was younger and from a different Asian background. Thames Valley Police apologised for the arrest, which they said was "not influenced by racial profiling".

The software engineer said he had no idea that police were still holding a five-year-old custody image of him until the day he was detained.

Choudhury said it was taken after he was previously detained in Portsmouth in 2021 following an altercation between two groups. He said he was not charged.

The 26-year-old said he was of Bangladeshi heritage, while the Milton Keynes burglary suspect was clearly from a Pakistani background.

He said: "It might not be a racial agenda from police, but because they're not people of colour, they might not know the difference.

"When I was held in the cell, all the police officers were laughing because they said they would never have arrested me, because it doesn't look like me.

"The officers who came from Newbury to interview me - before the interview they said they knew it wasn't me."

In a statement, Thames Valley Police said: "While we apologise for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, their arrest was based on the investigating officers' own visual assessment that the individual matched the suspect in CCTV footage following a retrospective facial recognition match, and was not influenced by racial profiling.

"To confirm, retrospective facial recognition technology did initially provide intelligence, but did not determine the arrest.

"Although later inquiries eliminated the individual from the investigation, this does not make the arrest unlawful.

"We continue to use policing tools responsibly while striving to improve and build trust in our communities."

Retrospective Facial Recognition, using the PND, is different to Live Facial Recognition technology, a more recent automated system which is being deployed by police forces in camera vans.

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