Internal emails and documents obtained by journalists reveal the Edmonton Police Service conducted Canada’s first live facial recognition trial on body-worn cameras, powered by technology from Israeli firm Corsight AI.
The pilot, run through the end of December 2025, equipped patrol officers with body cameras capable of scanning faces in real time and matching them against a watch list of 6,341 flagged individuals. The list consisted of people flagged for categories including violent or assaultive behavior, armed and dangerous status, weapons offenses, escape risk, and high-risk offender designation.
Corsight AI supplied the facial recognition model, integrated into the system through a partnership with Axon, the dominant supplier of body-worn cameras to North American law enforcement. The cameras operated only during daylight hours for the duration of the proof-of-concept phase.
The Edmonton Police Commission and the chief’s committee are reviewing the pilot results before deciding whether to expand, continue, or terminate the program. Edmonton is the first Canadian police service to test this configuration at any scale.
Civil liberties advocates in Canada have argued that real-time facial recognition on public streets operates differently from post-incident identification tools, because mobile deployment extends watch-list checks wherever officers patrol rather than confining them to fixed camera locations.
Axon’s partnership with Corsight means agencies purchasing Axon equipment may, in future contracts, gain access to live facial recognition capabilities without a separate vendor relationship. Law enforcement agencies in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa have historically faced strong public opposition to facial recognition deployment, and British Columbia’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has previously ruled against warrantless police use of the technology.
The Edmonton disclosure comes amid broader Canadian regulatory attention to the Axon-Corsight integration. The federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner and provincial counterparts have previously issued joint guidance requiring police services to complete privacy impact assessments before deploying facial recognition, and to justify its use against less intrusive alternatives.
Sources: CBC News, The Record
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
