Canadian police trialing facial recognition bodycams

A Canadian municipal police force in Edmonton is trialling facial recognition bodycams, with up to 50 officers taking part in the trial this month. According to Axon, the technology will run the recognition software in the background when cameras are activated, capturing images within roughly four feet of the officer and sending them to a cloud service for comparison against 6,341 people already flagged in the police system, with non-matches deleted and the database owned by the Police Service.

Officers won’t turn the cameras on in the field unless they are actively investigating or enforcing, and Axon says the company does not see the images. The Edmonton Police Service’s move marks a shift from police accountability to what some critics call mass surveillance, a view echoed by an associated law professor quoted in the piece. The Edmonton Police Force will review the trial results and decide whether to move forward with broader use of the technology in 2026.

According to the article, the discussion also notes the technology’s history with Axon’s ethics board, which in 2019 warned against relying on face matching on body cameras.