Thank you.
I want to begin by acknowledging that today is March 21, which marks the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It was some 60 years ago, in 1960, in fact, when the Sharpeville police massacre happened in South Africa against workers.
I want to take a step back from the specificity around the tools and talk about the systems for a moment, and draw a direct line between what I believe occurred under C-51 and the implementation of anti-terrorism protocols provincially that led to the analog version of facial recognition, which was the practice of street checks and racial profiling, otherwise known as “carding” by local police services. I'll pick up from there, because I believe that practice of racial profiling, the analog version, has been in a very sophisticated way ruled out and then reimplemented as has been identified here through private sector contracts that allow companies like Clearview to do indirectly what police services were doing directly.
I want to also situate the conversation in the system, which is this notion of predictive policing as the basis of my questions, because I believe that the topic of facial recognition may be overly broad to get any kind of real coverage on this.
My questions will be to Ms. Khoo, who had laid out in an extensive report some of the bases for recommendations moving forward. I would like Ms. Khoo to comment on the evolution of predictive policing, its inherent racial bias and this notion of creating de facto panoptic prisons within our communities that are often over-surveilled, over-policed and underserviced.
Ms. Khoo, would you care to comment on that, and perhaps draw any lines that you may have come across between the practices of street checks and carding to populate data in things like CPIC, which would obviously be replaced by more sophisticated data such as AI and facial recognition?