Dozens of Edmonton police officers patrolled the city’s streets in December equipped with body cameras that used artificial intelligence to scan faces, looking for what the police have deemed “high-risk offenders.”

Documents and emails obtained by CBC News offer new insight into the Edmonton Police Service’s trial of bodycam facial recognition technology — the first police agency in Canada to do so.

The AI-powered facial recognition software was trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a watchlist, based on mugshots of people police say have serious criminal warrants or are flagged as potential safety risks.

Key details from the documents include:

• The privacy assessment submitted to Alberta’s privacy watchdog by EPS includes wording that experts told CBC could open the possibility of sharing sensitive information;

• A “critical fault” system outage prevented matches for several days and may have extended the pilot project;

• The facial recognition model was supplied by Corsight AI, an Israeli company whose technology has reportedly been used for mass surveillance in Gaza.