Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Technology presence
What these categories mean
- ALPR
- Automated licence plate readers (ALPR): camera systems that automatically capture, read, and log vehicle licence plates with location and time, producing a searchable record of vehicle movements.
- Fixed cameras & RTCC
- Agency-operated fixed video cameras and the real-time crime centers (RTCC) that aggregate live and recorded feeds for monitoring.
- Face recognition
- Software that matches faces in images or video against a reference database to identify or verify individuals.
- Drones / UAS
- Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), commonly called drones, operated by an agency for overhead observation, imaging, or sensing.
- Gunshot detection
- Networks of acoustic sensors that detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert an agency.
- Body-worn & dashcam
- Officer body-worn and in-vehicle dashboard cameras that record encounters; public access to the footage is frequently restricted.
- Doorbell & camera registry
- Programs that give an agency access to privately owned camera footage: doorbell-camera partnerships, citizen camera registries, and private-camera integration platforms.
- Cell-site simulators
- Devices that mimic cell towers to locate or identify nearby mobile phones. They are often called Stingrays, or IMSI catchers after the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number that identifies each phone on a network. Adjacent: communications surveillance outside the visual/sensor core.
- Predictive policing
- Software that forecasts where crime may occur or who may be involved, to direct policing. Adjacent: analytics rather than a sensing deployment.
- Social-media monitoring
- Tools that collect and analyze public social-media activity for an agency. Adjacent: open-source/communications monitoring outside the visual/sensor core.
The record
National body-worn camera rollout of about 10,000 cameras across contract and federal officers, begun November 2024. As of June 2025 over 63 percent of cameras were operational and more than 53 percent of frontline officers across 385 detachments were trained and equipped.
Sources: RCMP national deployment announcement (Nov 2024)Federation of Black Canadians rollout analysis (Jun 2025)
Documented use of cell-site simulators (the RCMP's term is mobile device identifier, MDI) across 125-plus investigations from 2005 to 2016. A federal Privacy Commissioner investigation found six of those deployments were not lawful. The RCMP does not routinely confirm or deny possessing the technology.
Sources: CBC, RCMP used cellphone tracking technology unlawfully (2017)OPC investigation summary
A federal Privacy Commissioner investigation found the RCMP's use of Clearview AI facial recognition violated the Privacy Act (2021). Clearview subsequently stopped offering its service in Canada.
Sources: OPC news release (Jun 2021)
Source: the public record. Canadian police-force and government publications, and federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner findings; per-entry citations on each record · retrieved July 2026