I am.
Evidence of meeting #20 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was rcmp.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #20 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was rcmp.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:25 a.m.
Officer in Charge, National Child Exploitation Crime Centre, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
I am.
11:25 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
If we went in camera, would you be willing to provide that name?
11:25 a.m.
Officer in Charge, National Child Exploitation Crime Centre, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Pardon?
11:25 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
If we went in camera, would you be willing to provide that name, given the parliamentary privileges of the members around this table?
11:25 a.m.
Officer in Charge, National Child Exploitation Crime Centre, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
My answer would prevail.
11:25 a.m.
Conservative
May 9th, 2022 / 11:25 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
Thank you very much.
I'm going to follow up with Mr. Stairs from the last time he gave testimony to the committee.
I want to ask you a couple of things to clarify that testimony from the Toronto Police Service.
Number one, can you just reidentify that the Toronto Police Service currently uses FR technology? Is that correct?
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
Who are your suppliers? How often is it used and what is it used for at this point, just to clarify?
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
I don't have the frequency. We use Intellibook, and the essential use of it is in identifying images from crime scenes against our mug shot database.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
When we talked before, you identified that it's completely a system in which you use human intervention or human review. Is that correct?
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
That's right. It's conducted by our forensic identification service, so there is a technician who takes the image, runs it into the system and looks at the results.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
I don't have the number, and I wouldn't want to give the wrong information. I'd have to go to my FIS, my forensic identification services team.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
I'm going to ask that you please provide that to the committee. I think that's pertinent to what we need that for.
When you're using that in the force right now, you're saying that you identify mug shots and then use that for.... Is it for evidence? Is it to identify criminals? Could you please explain exactly how that is being used?
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
Sure. You might have an image from an event, and you have a person, who is usually a suspect you're trying to identify. That would be handed over to FIS, and they would look at the situation and ensure that it meets our criteria, that it's a significant enough crime and the right type to meet the criteria we've set up. At this point, they would run the image against our Intellibook system, and it would result in a ranked order of matches, some of which might be relatively good and some of which might be poor. There will be an assessment by the FIS technician as to any of those being viable, and that would be presented back to the investigators.
If none of the matches was sufficiently strong, then there would be no result returned. The investigator would then have to corroborate that identity through other means. Facial recognition is not considered an identification; it's a suggestion of where to look.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
Then when you talk about an event, is this surveillance?
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
No, it would be more like.... Let's say there was a homicide, and you would have a security camera, and from that security camera, you might have an image of the perpetrator.
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
You'd pull a still, and then you'd run that.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
To talk about how this technology is helping the old methods, if you didn't have FRT, how would you be identifying individuals like that?
11:30 a.m.
Chief Information Officer, Toronto Police Service
You would be taking the image and putting it on television. You'd be running it through the community putting BOLOs out to try to see if you could find that individual.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
Ryan Williams Conservative Bay of Quinte, ON
In terms of trying to understand why the Privacy Commissioner is finding fault in this—and this is what we're trying to investigate—if you had a crime scene and you had fingerprints, can you use them the same way that you're using FRT right now?
