Incident 385: Canadian Police's Release of Suspect's AI-Generated Facial Photo Reportedly Reinforced Racial Profiling

Description: The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) in Canada released a facial image of a Black male suspect generated by an algorithm using DNA phenotyping, which was denounced by the local community as racial profiling.

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Alleged: Parabon Nanolabs developed an AI system deployed by Edmonton Police Service, which harmed Black residents in Edmonton.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
385
Report Count
6
Incident Date
2022-10-04
Editors
Khoa Lam
The controversial company using DNA to sketch the faces of criminals
nature.com · 2020

It was May 2019 when Parabon Nanolabs ran into a major controversy. At the time, it was the most famous forensic-genetics company on the planet. From its headquarters in Reston, Virginia, Parabon was helping police to crack cold-crime cases…

Police use DNA phenotyping in unsolved sexual assault
edmontonpolice.ca · 2022

The Edmonton Police Service is, for the first time in its history, using DNA phenotyping in the hopes of identifying a suspect in a 2019 sexual assault.

On Sunday, March 10, 2019, at approximately 5:45 a.m., police received a call that a fe…

EPS Statement on DNA Phenotyping
edmontonpolice.ca · 2022

My name is Enyinnah Okere and as Chief Operating Officer for the Community Safety and Well-being Bureau of EPS, I am responsible for overseeing our sexual assault section - it was my team that put out a release two days ago about the unsolv…

Cops Upload Image of Suspect Generated From DNA, Then Delete After Mass Criticism
futurism.com · 2022

An image of a suspect, created from a sample of his DNA? It sounds like dystopian sci-fi, but experts say it's even worse — it's tech that cops are already rolling out, even though it almost certainly doesn't work.

Alberta, Canada's Edmonto…

Cops forced to apologize over AI that created 'racist' suspect image from DNA
the-sun.com · 2022

Alberta, Canada's Edmonton Police Section (EPS) shared the AI-generated image on Twitter and revealed how sci-fi-like "DNA phenotyping" can be used to predict what a suspect looks like.

Police had to remove the controversial AI-generated im…

Police Are Using Portraits Generated from DNA to Catch Criminals
petapixel.com · 2022

Police departments are using a new high-tech tool for catching criminals and identifying victims: realistic portraits generated from DNA data. The technology is astounding in its results, but it has attracted its fair share of criticism and…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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