The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, wrote “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”1 Published in 1914, the meaning is still relevant in 2021, although today’s technology might have yielded a different metaphor. Brandeis implies that making the intentions and actions of government officials highly visible to society would inherently curb unethical and immoral behavior. If making the intentions and actions of government officials highly visible is effective, then it would likely be effective to anyone in society. Ostensibly, a clear public view, coupled with the certainty of apprehension, would be a highly effective deterrent of misconduct in almost any environment. Today, “sunlight” could be supplemented by an “electric light” provided by security cameras and high-tech surveillance and monitoring systems. Advances in technology bring promise and potential, but also uncertainties and risk, when applied to resolve societal issues, particularly when used in policing. The police should explore if the widespread, rapid advancement of technology can enhance the effectiveness of their duties. If so, can transparency, accountability, community, and technology coexist to increase public safety?
The Arc of Technology
The rate of technological advancement is accelerating exponentially, and humankind continues to find ways to harness and merge it with nearly all facets of life. Modern technology has become increasingly sophisticated since the late 1960s and adopted more rapidly since the first iPhone was released in 2008. The technology in modern smartphones has more than 100,000 times more processing power than the Apollo 11 computer.2 Today, internet use coupled with interactive technology has found its way into almost every aspect of life. How many people do you know do not use Siri, Alexa, Google maps, Uber, Lyft, or spam filters on a daily basis? These are just a few platforms that offer an interactive experience through an artificially intelligent (AI) platform.
In the age of AI, there is a legitimate tendency for each organization to ask whether or when a given task will be taken over by automation.3 The capability of applied technologies will change what humans do at work as well as the workplace itself. Automation will take over certain tasks done with human labor, assist in work done with human labor, and exceed what tasks can be done with human labor. In regard to policing, specifically, U.C. Davis School of Law Professor Elizabeth E. Joh, wrote,
The deskilling of the police is inevitable because automation is increasingly becoming a part of policing. Many American police departments already use artificial intelligence: It drives automatic license plate recognition, social media threat analysis, predictive policing software, facial recognition technology, and autonomous drones.4
Considering this, human police officers will not be completely replaced by automatons any time soon, but many of the tasks currently performed by human police personnel are likely to be automated.
State-of-the-Art Police Technologies
What would a public safety system that combines the latest high-tech monitoring technology with automation and AI look like? At the street level, residents would see fixed monitoring stations with license plate readers (LPRs) and automated facial recognition readers at main thoroughfares throughout the city. Next, one might see the same technology affixed to a terrestrial or low-altitude aerial drone with police lights and loaded with two-way communication technologies like Facetime or Duo so it can effectively communicate with residents who might need assistance.
Far above the city, one might see high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling up to 62 square miles at once with an Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) affixed underneath it.5 ARGUS-IS can zoom in up to 30 centimeters, enough to discern the outline of a handheld weapon, while also being able to track vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians.
All of these devices would be coupled with social media platforms that allow residents to share their personal media footage with law enforcement, similar to the Neighbors application managed by Ring. This platform would give residents the ability to report criminal or suspicious activity from their smartphones as easily as making an Amazon purchase or summoning an Uber. Furthermore, police personnel would be able to map out a geo-fence and request all personal security footage for a specific window of time.
The police would have access to all government-owned surveillance of a crime scene, and, potentially, all privately owned surveillance with the owner’s consent. Officers could review any and all relevant security footage within the vicinity of a crime without ever leaving their desk. This crowd-sourced technology, once in place, could monitor and access a much greater area than a standard patrol officer. Doing so would allow the police to redeploy patrol officers to a verified response system based on feedback received from the interactive technology on the various monitoring platforms. Two critical questions, though, must be answered. Would such a system be effective? Further, would it go too far to protect the public at the expense of their privacy?
Effectiveness of Surveillance Technologies
A study reviewed by the College of Policing on traffic speed cameras supports the notion that the certainty of apprehension can prevent and reduce criminal behavior. A summary of the study states,
Overall, the evidence suggests that the intervention has reduced crime. The meta-analysis found that speed cameras led to reductions in average speed (7%), proportion of vehicles exceeding the speed limit (52%), collisions (19%), collisions resulting in injury (18%) and in severe or fatal collisions (21%), when compared to sites with no speed cameras.6
The report further suggests that the speed cameras deter crime by one of two ways:
1-General deterrence—The threat of being caught and punished as a result of speed cameras discouraging potential offenders in the general population from speeding.
2-Specific deterrence—The act of being caught and punished as a result of speed cameras discouraging active offenders from re-offending.
Reducing crime through technology goes beyond traffic violations. A crime policy advisor to regional and national governments, Tom Gash, wrote: “dramatic reductions in crime rates over the last 20 years aren’t down to policy reforms—they’re because technology has made it harder to commit crimes.” Gash points out that vehicle theft has been cut in half for many developed countries and is at “one-sixth of the early 90s levels” in the UK due to countries forcing car manufactures to install “central locking and electronic immobilisers.”7
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are another emerging option to enhance the deterrent effect of the police presence. In November 2015, the Devon and Cornwall Police Force was the first police force in the UK to launch a dedicated drone unit.8 Veteran technology reporter, Jan Howells, wrote that drones are used “for everything from missing person investigations to tracking suspects in firearms incidents and counter-terrorism operations.”9 Howells also noted that drones are being used to take detailed photographs in crash investigations and monitor vast wooded areas and coastlines to deter wildlife crimes.
Another published study, led by criminal justice professor Eric Piza, includes a 40-year systematic review and meta-analysis of closed-caption televisions (CCTV) surveillance, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing crime. The study showed that CCTVs can make a “significant” impact on crime reduction when actively monitored and “modest” reductions in crime when passively monitored.10 Analyst Kathleen Walch reported that AI technologies are now capable of “keeping a watchful eye on crowd control and surveillance” and are “being increasingly used for facial identification, and scanning video footage for anomalies.”11 Research on how interactive technology can impact policing compels leaders to take a closer look at LPR and actively monitored CCTV systems. As more agencies install and merge their systems, the more efficient and effective police will be (collectively) at locating vehicles. As these technologies merge with one another, law enforcement should see an increase in their efficacy and efficiency. Though these technologies may prove extraordinarily effective, its effect on individual and collective privacy is a legitimate concern.
Public Perceptions of Full-Scale Monitoring
Technology has impacted and changed virtually all institutions in the modern world; the social establishment is no exception. The line between security and liberty might be pushed to an Orwellian state without opposition. However, recent revelations on the type of personal information being monitored and provided to third-party organizations by Facebook (data mining) has brought this discussion to U.S. House of Representative committees in Washington, DC.12 An article published on this issue quoted AI expert Peter Eckersley as saying,
Facebook can learn almost anything about you by using artificial intelligence to analyze your behavior… That knowledge turns out to be perfect both for advertising and propaganda. Will Facebook ever prevent itself from learning people’s political views or other sensitive facts about them?13
While technology is very convenient, most users are still not comfortable providing full access to their digital and biometric data. If Facebook users are uncomfortable with their political views and biometric data being stored and used for potential advertising propaganda, how will the public view police retention of photos or videos of their public actions captured from CCTVs, LPRs, and UAVs?
California passed Assembly Bill 1215 in 2019, which prohibits police from using facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies for three years after “about 1 in 5 legislators” were erroneously matched to a person with a criminal record.14 However, facial recognition continues to be refined and improved, which could make monitoring and enforcing the law much more efficient over time. Another concern voiced by California Governor Gavin Newsome is that biometric surveillance is similar to requiring people to carry identification at all times, allowing others to identify and or monitor virtually anyone they choose without reasonable cause or permission.15 Piza’s research on surveillance cameras, however, did prompt him to note,
The increased prevalence of surveillance cameras in public places has led scholars to consider CCTV as a “banal good” that has become part of everyday life, taken‐for‐granted by the public and subjected to little scrutiny by the media.16
Ultimately, local, state, and federal legislation (along with the court system) will very likely be the ones to determine the ongoing balancing of people’s desire for public safety and security against individual and collective liberty.
Costs of Policing Technology
If, in spite of privacy concerns, a system as described is to be implemented, it would certainly require considerable capital to put in place. However, as costs for policing continue to soar, municipalities may actually be forced to adopt CCTV, AI, and UAV systems to reduce their costs. One study compiled by the Center for Popular Democracy indicates that several major municipalities are spending up to (and in some cases beyond) 40 percent of their general fund revenues on policing.17 Another study completed at the Harvard Kennedy School (in association with the National Institute of Justice) determined that public expenditures on policing in the United States more than quadrupled between 1982 and 2006.18
The Center for Popular Democracy President, Jennifer Epps-Addison, stated,
If our goals are to ensure that young people have access to quality education, to ensure that every family has a home and is able to feed themselves, to ensure that everybody who is willing and able to work has an opportunity to find a job, if those are our goals and create safety, why do our budget priorities misalign so dramatically with those stated goals? Place after place, no matter what part of the country they’re in, we’re finding the same stories, and it speaks to the need to re-envision and reimagine public safety.19
In December 2019, this author assembled a panel of law enforcement experts to discuss how interactive technology will impact law enforcement. The panel’s response was universal in its opinion that technology could reduce costs by transitioning tasks now done by humans to automated systems. The panel also felt using technology would reduce claims of bias currently plaguing police contacts with community members.
A recent study of the introduction of police-monitored cameras in Montevideo, Uruguay, found a reduction in crime where the cameras were located and an apparent reduction in costs.20 The data indicated that the monitoring system reduced approximately 35 offenses per month. A cost-benefit analysis showed that the system cost per offense prevented was around $830 while the cost per offence incurred costs the city $4,200 per offense—“five times higher than the estimated cost per offence prevented.”21
In Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the police have already deployed a robot police officer to tackle many of the tasks currently handled by human police officers around the world. Using an integrated tablet, the robot police officer allows people to “report crimes, submit paperwork, and pay fines for traffic violations.” The Dubai Police Department hopes to have robot officers compose 25 percent of its police force by the year 2030.22 As technology automates more policing tasks, the number of human police officers employed at a police department, as well as how they are deployed, is going to change.
Deploying Tools and Transparency for Public Safety
As communities grapple with how to allocate their limited resources, coupled with the ongoing legitimacy crisis, it will be imperative for police agencies to learn how to do more with less. Leaders should develop plans to accommodate future needs, upgrade their IT infrastructure, and consider which tech alternatives are best suited to help protect a community without adding staff. There are myriad viable technologies on the horizon—one common aspect an agency can prepare for now is to build infrastructure that has the ability to expand its bandwidth to accommodate new technology as it comes online.
As new technologies are applied to policing, care must be taken to avoid losing personal touch between the community and police agency. Also, care must be taken to avoid overreach when it comes to individual and collective liberty and privacy; a “lawful but awful” attitude will be detrimental to law enforcement and interactive technologies in the long run. These tools will eventually evolve into virtual time machines, such as the top-secret ARGUS-IS. As long as these tools are not abused, and true transparency (publicity, sunlight, and the electric light) is the cornerstone of policies used with our community partners, these tools will be good for public safety and society as a whole. d
Notes:
1Louis Brandeis, “What Publicity Can Do,” Other People’s Money—and How the Bankers Use It (New York, NY: F.A. Stokes, 1914), Chapter V.
2Andrew Orr, “iPhones Have 100,000 Times More Processing Power Than Apollo 11 Computer,” The Mac Observer, July 17, 2019.
3Juliana Bidadanure and Ge Wang, “Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems” HAI Blog, October 20, 2019.
4 Elizabeth E. Joh, “The Consequences of Automating and Deskilling the Police,” UCLA Law Review, December 6, 2019.
5Ehud Rattner, “DARPA’s New High Resolution Camera,” The Future of Things, October 31, 2013.
6Cochrane Injuries Group, “Speed Cameras,” Crime Reduction Toolkit (College of Policing, 2017).
7Tom Gash, “We’re Safer than Ever before, and It’s All Thanks to Technology,” WIRED, December 27, 2016.
8Devon and Cornwall Police, “Use of Drones,” Behind the Blue Line, November 24, 2015, updated April 21, 2020.
9Jan Howells, “How Technology Is Helping in the Fight against Crime,” Orange Business Services (blog), March 21, 2018.
10Eric L. Piza et al., “CCTV Surveillance for Crime Prevention,” Criminology & Public Policy 18, no. 1 (February 2019): 135–159.
11Kathleen Walch, “The Growth of AI Adoption in Law Enforcement,” Forbes, July 26, 2019.
12Natasha Singer, “What You Don’t Know About How Facebook Uses Your Data,” New York Times, April 11, 2018.
13Singer, “What You Don’t Know About How Facebook Uses Your Data.”
14Anita Chabria, “Facial Recognition Software Mistook 1 in 5 California Lawmakers for Criminals, Says ACLU,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2019.
15Stephanie Sundier, “California Enacts Bill to Prevent Police Use of Biometric Surveillance,” Jurist, October 10, 2019.
16Piza et al., “CCTV Surveillance for Crime Prevention.”
17Alan Neuhauser, “Cities Spend More and More on Police. Is It Working?” U.S. News & World Report, July 7, 2017; Kate Hamaji et al., Freedom to Thrive: Reimagining Safety & Security in Our Communities (Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and Black Youth Project 100, 2017
18George Gascon and Todd Foglesong, Making Policing More Affordable: Managing Costs and Measuring Value in Policing, New Perspectives in Policing, December 2010.
19Neuhauser, “Cities Spend More and More on Police. Is It Working?”
20Ignacio Munyo and Martin Rossi, “Police-Monitored Cameras and Crime,” VoxEU, June 30, 2019.
21Munyo and Rossi, “Police-Monitored Cameras and Crime.”
22Swapna Krishna, “Dubai Hopes to Have a Human-Free Police Station by 2030,” Engadget, May 22, 2017.
Please cite as
Ben Lowry, “Publicity, Sunlight, and the Electric Light,” Police Chief Online, January 13, 2021.
