Toronto police have been using facial recognition technology for more than a year — a tool police say increases the speed and efficiency of criminal investigations and has led to arrests in major crimes including homicides. Toronto police say that facial recognition technology is being used to compare images of potential suspects captured on public or private cameras to its internal database of approximately 1.5 million mugshots. According to Saunders’ report, Toronto police ran 1,516 facial recognition searches between March and December last year, using approximately 5,000 still and video images. Research has shown that facial recognition technology has racialized false positive rates: some systems are more likely to produce an inaccurate match for Black women than white men, for example. In that case, investigators would still have to get the court’s permission to use the facial technology during the probe.

Source: thestar May 28, 2019 09:00 UTC