GoKawiilI stood before a hulking glass and brick structure in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas. Thousands gathered inside to see what had been billed as “the future of policing in the digital age.” As press, I was prohibited from entering, but from a number of nearby locations, I met with attendees who told me what was being sold within. And I learned that AI is threatening to seize the very heart of policing in America.
The promise of AI at this year’s International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Technology Conference focused on automating routine parts of the job, which also happen to be critical steps in the legal process. It’s a similar sales pitch to the one that’s been exhaustively broadcast to businesses in recent years: Let the machines handle the busywork, so you can focus on more meaningful tasks. But in law enforcement, the automation of seemingly innocuous “busywork” — like taking the time to carefully fill out a police report or review a suspect’s case history — can have immense consequences on people’s lives.
Among the AI products on offer at the conference’s showroom this May were facial-recognition cameras, automated license plate readers, body cameras, chatbots to field non-emergency 911 calls, gunshot detection platforms, drones, and report-writing tools. As the country has reckoned with law enforcement becoming detached from actual, human police presence in neighborhoods, the industry is continuing to embrace automation.
Fort Worth Convention Center, 2018. Photo: Felix Mizioznikov / Shutterstock
The decision-making process itself in police departments is increasingly being handed over to algorithms. A legion of tech startups are now selling AI to police as a kind of automated air traffic control system, a centralized digital brain that can process the vast quantities of data now being collected — oftentimes by other surveillance and automation tools sold by those very same companies — and help departments delegate resources accordingly. Even police aren’t necessarily thrilled about these pitches.
“A lot of it is sales gimmicks that don’t actually deliver on what the promise is,” Abrem Ayana, a police captain in Brookhaven, Georgia, told me. In the absence of comprehensive federal oversight or industry standards — and due to the novelty of the tech itself — law enforcement officials like Ayana often have no choice but to take companies’ word that their products are safe and that they work as advertised.
Police departments have used technology for decades to analyze data and, in theory, make more informed decisions in the field. In some notorious cases, it’s completely backfired. CompStat and PredPol (short for “computer comparison statistics” and “predictive policing,” respectively), for example, were two early experiments that sought to mitigate fallible human judgement through the use of supposedly unbiased statistics. Instead, they ended up exacerbating the very problems they were meant to solve. But while those early experiments failed to usher in a new era of unbiased policing as their proponents had hoped, human beings were at least still at the helm, making the most important decisions.
The sales pitch behind this new wave of AI products is that the mistakes of the past were enabled by a lack of objective, real-time data. AI can, in theory, now help to bridge the gap by ramping up the amount of public safety data that’s collected and the level of analysis to which it’s subjected. Many public safety advocacy groups and legal experts, however, warn that an influx of black box algorithms into law enforcement will erode transparency and accountability at a time when much of the public’s trust of the police is already dangerously frayed.
Jason Truppi, a former FBI special agent specializing in cybercrime, told me that police are drowning in a sea of data. Truppi, wearing a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, spoke quickly and excitedly in sentences peppered with corporate buzzphrases. In late 2020, he cofounded ForceMetrics, a software company offering an “AI-powered decision-assist platform, enabling public safety agencies to increase operational efficiency and better serve their communities in real time,” as described by its LinkedIn page.
All of the record-keeping systems that police departments have been using for the past two decades, from emergency call logs to parole record files to body camera footage databases, have, according to Truppi, created a burdensome information overload. “All the systems of record [used by police departments] are essentially antiquated,” he told me.
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