Montreal Police Acquired AI Video Surveillance Platform with Undisclosed Biometric Capabilities

In December 2025, reporting by Pivot, a Quebec civil liberties organization, revealed that the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) had acquired a $1.8 million, five-year AI video analysis platform from iMotion Security. The SPVM initially refused to disclose which software the platform used or to release the privacy impact assessment that authorized the procurement.

Subsequent investigative reporting in February 2026 identified the software as Rank One Computing's (ROC) video analytics platform, an American-made system deployed across 46 cameras. The ROC software's documented capabilities include search by clothing and vehicle attributes, but also built-in biometric features: facial recognition, age estimation, ethnicity detection, gender classification, facial hair detection, and emotion analysis. These capabilities are part of the software's standard feature set and can be toggled on or off through configuration rather than requiring new procurement or hardware changes.

The SPVM stated that biometric identification features are "not part of the current context of use." However, civil liberties organizations have raised concerns that the capabilities exist within the deployed software and could be activated at any time through a configuration change — without additional procurement, public consultation, or legislative authorization. The absence of a publicly available privacy impact assessment, the initial refusal to name the software vendor, and the gap between the platform's full capabilities and the SPVM's stated use case create a significant transparency deficit.

The deployment raises specific questions in light of documented racial bias in facial recognition systems. Research has shown that facial recognition algorithms, including those comparable to ROC's, exhibit significantly higher error rates for Black individuals and women. In a city where policing of racialized communities is an active public concern, the acquisition of AI surveillance technology with ethnicity detection capabilities — even if claimed to be currently disabled — represents a meaningful hazard.