Edmonton police emails, documents provide new information on Canada-first AI facial recognition bodycam pilot

Dozens of Edmonton police officers patrolled the city’s streets in December equipped with body cameras that used artificial intelligence to scan faces, looking for what the police have deemed "high-risk offenders."

Documents and emails obtained by CBC News offer new insight into the Edmonton Police Service’s trial of bodycam facial recognition technology — the first police agency in Canada to do so.

The AI-powered facial recognition software was trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a watchlist, based on mugshots of people police say have serious criminal warrants or are flagged as potential safety risks.

Key details from the documents include:

• The privacy assessment submitted to Alberta’s privacy watchdog by EPS includes wording that experts told CBC could open the possibility of sharing sensitive information;

• A “critical fault” system outage prevented matches for several days and may have extended the pilot project;

• The facial recognition model was supplied by Corsight AI, an Israeli company whose technology has reportedly been used for mass surveillance in Gaza.