Artificial intelligence is reshaping public safety in ways that were difficult to imagine even a decade ago. From predicting where crimes may occur to identifying missing persons, AI tools are being adopted by governments and law enforcement agencies around the world at a rapid pace. The result is a landscape full of potential, with some genuine concern raised by certain advocates over the proper limits of state power.
On the promising side, the results are hard to dismiss. Predictive policing tools have helped departments in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago direct resources toward areas of elevated risk. AI-assisted analysis can accelerate investigations after terrorist attacks by processing enormous volumes of footage in hours rather than weeks. Automated licence plate recognition has helped recover stolen vehicles and locate missing persons. These are practical tools that help officers do their jobs more effectively, and dismissing them would be a disservice not only to the communities they protect, but to the technological gravity of the moment in which we find ourselves.
The concern is not with the technology itself – it is with who controls it, under what jurisdiction, and how much say everyday citizens have in governing that process. There is no doubt that privacy concerns around the implementation of AI tools in the public safety space must be reckoned with. It is important that public institutions wielding these tools develop consistent frameworks around use cases to ensure transparency and foster trust with the people they serve. In Ontario, the Peel Police Service is leading the charge on that file, having held public consultations in late 2025 on the presence of AI in policing. These consultations yielded a final report the findings of which will inform the subsequent development of a governance structure for AI in policing. The central themes covered human rights and AI in policing; predictive policing and machine learning; and privacy, data protection, and governance.
The increasingly prominent use of AI in chaperoning the day-to-day flow of modern law enforcement is ultimately, whatever asterisks one wishes to append, an inevitability. Rather than lamenting the trade-offs that the arrival of any new technology heralds, the coming years ought to be regarded with a sense of celebration at the stunning new horizons opening up – balanced of course by an acknowledgement of the civic responsibility that will be required to successfully navigate them. In this vein, it is worth examining some of the exciting initiatives afoot in some Canadian cities.
In addition to the aforementioned case of Peel, two others arising in recent months stand out. In Toronto, starting in May and June 2026 and on a rolling basis over the next few years, select intersections in higher traffic areas will see the installation of ‘smart traffic signals’, in which cutting-edge AI tools will be able to decide when lights change based on individualised analyses of real-time traffic conditions. The implications of this are huge: as integration accelerates, the dawn of a new era in which the congestion of city road networks is rendered increasingly trivial by AI-powered infrastructure beckons.
In Cobourg, the municipality’s police service announced in March 2026 that it would be embedding an AI response agent into its public communications framework to support the processing of non-emergency calls and general inquiries. As operators are more efficiently redirected to emergency duty, this is a development which carries the potential of saving countless lives.
For those who care about public safety in a modern world fraught with manifold threats, all of this is worth watching closely. The tools being deployed today to buttress public safety in Canada and around the world will in more ways than some of us might think come to define the everyday lives of future generations. We cannot drop the ball on this.
