Edmonton Police Deploy NeoFace Biometric Tech in Criminal Investigations

The police force of one of Canada’s most prominent cities has deployed facial recognition technology from NEC to aid in its criminal investigations.

Edmonton Police Service officials disclosed their use of the technology this week, but emphasized that the deployment is the result of years of preparation. The service is using NeoFace Reveal to scan the faces of individual suspects from surveillance images and compare them against mugshot databases held by the EPS and the Calgary Police Service. (Edmonton is the capital city of the province of Alberta, while Calgary is Alberta’s most populous city and a prominent cultural center.)

In announcing the deployment, EPS officials placed a strong emphasis on the various constraints and safeguards concerning how the facial recognition technology will be used. The technology will not be applied to live feeds, only to photographic and video evidence, and only to identify suspects and potential leads in specific criminal investigations. Only the members of a specialized investigative team will have access to the technology, and their activities using the NeoFace platform can be audited by supervisors.

EPS officials also noted that they have submitted a privacy impact assessment to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta – a voluntary step that is not legally required of them. (The Office has not yet responded to the assessment.)

The EPS’s effort to highlight its safeguards and its attention to privacy are perhaps best understood in the context of the revelations about Clearview AI. Its internet-trawling facial recognition platform has been pitched to a wide range of police agencies and other organizations, and a recent report brought scrutiny to Toronto’s police service with its revelation that Toronto police had trialed Clearview AI’s software.

The Clearview uproar prompted the Ottawa police service to reveal its own trial of facial recognition technology in early 2020, though in that case the technology in question was NeoFace Reveal and, as in the Edmonton deployment, it was used only to search for matches against a mugshot database.

Having underlined its safeguards, the EPS was also keen to note that NEC’s facial recognition technology was already delivering results, having officially been in use for about a month. EPS Research and Development Division superintendent Devin Laforce said that NeoFace Reveal searches helped to identify three suspects in an assualt case, and led to leads in a homicide investigation, adding that the Service is “confident that this facial recognition tool will keep our communities safe and secure” by delivering a unique form of assistance in criminal investigations.

Sources: Edmonton Journal, CTV News, Global News

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February 2, 2022 – by Alex Perala