Police body cameras equipped with artificial intelligence have been trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a \u201chigh risk\u201d watch list in the Canadian city of Edmonton, a live test of whether facial recognition technology shunned as too intrusive could have a place in policing throughout North America.<\/p>\n
But six years after leading body camera maker Axon Enterprise, Inc. said police use of facial recognition technology posed serious ethical concerns, the pilot project \u2014 switched on last week\u2014 is raising alarms far beyond Edmonton, the continent\u2019s northernmost city of more than 1 million people.<\/p>\n
A former chair of Axon\u2019s AI ethics board, which led the company to temporarily abandon facial recognition in 2019, told The Associated Press he\u2019s concerned that the Arizona-based company is moving forward without enough public debate, testing and expert vetting about the societal risks and privacy implications.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s essential not to use these technologies, which have very real costs and risks, unless there\u2019s some clear indication of the benefits,\u201d said the former board chair, Barry Friedman, now a law professor at New York University.<\/p>\n
Axon founder and CEO Rick Smith contends that the Edmonton pilot is not a product launch but \u201cearly-stage field research\u201d that will assess how the technology performs and reveal the safeguards needed to use it responsibly.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy testing in real-world conditions outside the U.S., we can gather independent insights, strengthen oversight frameworks, and apply those learnings to future evaluations, including within the United States,\u201d Smith wrote in a blog post.<\/p>\n
The pilot is meant to help make Edmonton patrol officers safer by enabling their body-worn cameras to detect anyone who authorities classified as having a \u201cflag or caution\u201d for categories such as \u201cviolent or assaultive; armed and dangerous; weapons; escape risk; and high-risk offender,\u201d said Kurt Martin, acting superintendent of the Edmonton Police Service. So far, that watch list has 6,341 people on it, Martin said at a Dec. 2 press conference. A separate watch list adds 724 people who have at least one serious criminal warrant, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really want to make sure that it\u2019s targeted so that these are folks with serious offenses,\u201d said Ann-Li Cooke, Axon\u2019s director of responsible AI. <\/p>\n
If the pilot expands, it could have a major effect on policing around the world. Axon, a publicly traded firm best known for developing the Taser, is the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras and has increasingly pitched them to police agencies in Canada and elsewhere. Axon last year beat its closest competitor, Chicago-based Motorola Solutions, in a bid to sell body cameras to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.<\/p>\n
Motorola said in a statement that it also has the ability to integrate facial recognition technology into police body cameras but, based on its ethical principles, has \u201cintentionally abstained from deploying this feature for proactive identification.\u201d It didn\u2019t rule out using it in the future. <\/p>\n
The government of Alberta in 2023 mandated body cameras for all police agencies in the province, including its capital city Edmonton, describing it as a transparency measure to document police interactions, collect better evidence and reduce timelines for resolving investigations and complaints.<\/p>\n
While many communities in the U.S. have also welcomed body cameras as an accountability tool, the prospect of real-time facial recognition identifying people in public places<\/a> has been unpopular across the political spectrum. Backlash from civil liberties advocates and a broader conversation about racial injustice helped push Axon and Big Tech companies to pause facial recognition software sales to police.<\/p>\n