Ottawa police moving forward with first phase of AI facial recognition

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Kavanagh said that any content generated remains subject to officer review, verification, editing, and approval before it can be used operationally.

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But Christian said this won’t always happen.

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“It’s worrisome because those documents that are drafted will form part of the evidence. They may eventually become evidence in court. They may either exonerate or convict an accused person. But Draft One is basically a form of a large language model. And one problem with large language models is hallucination,” said Christian.

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AI hallucinations are the term for the tendency of large language model systems to fabricate information that looks plausible.

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Dr. Alex Hanna, author of The AI Con — a book skeptical of “AI hype” — agreed that these check-ins are unlikely to happen.

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“That’s not what happens in other cases. Even in cases that have had other types of non-AI-enabled body cameras. If there’s a recheck of wrongdoing, it’s typically through the process of a lawsuit or litigation, and then that comes out through discovery,” Hanna said.

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Hanna wonders how time-saving technologies like Draft One really are. “If you had enough time to do the oversight, why did you need the tools in the first place?” she said.

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Oversight of AI a concern

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Ryan Frisch is a legal counsel at the Law Commission of Ontario. He’s also the author of a research paper part of the commission’s AI in criminal justice project, “Use of AI by Law Enforcement.”

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He said genuine oversight likely won’t happen for two reasons.

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One, he said, is that telling busy officers and judges with enormous caseloads and complex issues that their only job is to look over something, the review process becomes weak, and people automatically assume AI is correct.

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The other reason Frisch thinks this won’t happen is that when other professionals use AI, their skills, judgement, insights, and ability to understand context all decline, he said.

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“The problem is that they’re flying blind on how to use them responsibly and spending big money on tools that may not survive the scrutiny of the court,” Frisch said.

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Kavanagh said that the OPS’s use of the technology will be subject to appropriate governance, privacy, legal, operational, and policy review processes before implementation.

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But Frisch said that these verification processes aren’t good enough — they’re internal to the police force. He’s working with the Law Commission to create province-wide governance of AI tools.

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“In Ontario, there are 58 criminal courts, there are 44 municipal and OPP police forces. If each one of those institutions, even at the local level, is creating its own self-governance rules about how to govern AI, it’s going to be a real mess,” he said. “There is currently no legislation or regulation in Ontario, or Canada, that is specifically directed at how to use AI responsibly in the criminal justice system.”

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How could the OPS use facial recognition?

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The report to the Ottawa Police Board refers to facial recognition as an “increasingly common biometric investigative tool used by police services to help generate more investigative leads from images connected to criminal organizations.”

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This, it says, will help police solve more cases and enhance public safety by more quickly identifying suspects and persons of interest.

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But there are concerns that AI facial recognition commonly makes mistakes that lead to wrongful arrests.

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“There’s a saying in the criminal justice system that it is much better to free 10 guilty persons than to convict one innocent person. I’m concerned about the impact this tool will have more on the few innocent people than the many criminals that you may arrest, or the number of guilty persons we’ve been able to find,” Christian said.