In this blog, Jake Richards, Labour PPC for Rother Valley, lays out the role technology can play in changing the way we police, and rebuild trust between the force and the public.
Note: The Social Market Foundation has invited parliamentary candidates from across the major parties to contribute an essay on a policy topic of their choice. To be clear, this does not represent an endorsement of any candidate in the election. The SMF remains strictly non-partisan.
Whilst out canvassing recently, I met a victim of crime who turned to Facebook rather than the police. She was a proud woman – a miner’s widow who had lived in the same bungalow for almost 50 years. Her garden furniture had been stolen and the criminals had attempted to enter her property but she had awoken and scared them off. This was, from my brief interaction with her, in keeping with her character.
She did not bother calling the police because they had not attended her house when she had called a few months earlier, when her furniture had been stolen and her garden vandalised. Instead, she wrote a message on a local ‘Crime Awareness’ Facebook community group, with several thousand members, warning others and asking whether anything suspicious had been observed. Despite the best efforts of her neighbours, the crime, perhaps unsurprisingly, went unsolved and, formally at least, unreported.
This is shocking, if not surprising. Recent data shows that more than 40% of people who experienced or witnessed a crime choose not to report it. The main reason for not reporting is that people do not think the police would take them seriously. After all, only 6% of offences lead to an individual being charged. Communities are too often being left to their own devices.
Re-establishing law and order on our streets must be a priority of any future Labour government. Labour is committed to restoring neighbourhood policing – local officers who understand their community and its needs. To support traditional policing, however, fundamental reform of our police and criminal justice system is required. After all, ‘reform or bust’ was Keir Starmer’s stark assessment on the next Labour government’s approach to public services.
Technology must be at the heart of this reform agenda. This article will explore just a few technological approaches that could lead to better policing and crime prevention and help to rebuild faith and trust in the efficacy of our police.
Whilst there have been piecemeal advances in recent years, the police lack a coherent and national approach to the use of data, social media, artificial intelligence and biometric recognition. Any far-reaching reforms would require rigorous political debate about civil liberties, safeguarding measures and privacy, but these are issues that must be engaged with in any event. The state should not fall behind large corporations in its use of potentially transformative technology in fighting criminality.
Currently, our policing technology is light years behind – the police national computer (“PNC”), for example, which details criminal records for use across crime prevention, is almost 50 years old and, as anyone who deals with this documentation will know, is far from user-friendly and difficult to share with appropriate agencies quickly. As a barrister, regularly representing child protection agencies in the courts, I know it can take weeks (sometimes months) to have criminal records disclosed for a court to consider when the welfare of a child requires immediate attention. This is absurd in the 21st Century and while outdated technology is not the only obstacle to expeditious information sharing, it’s an important one – and one that could be overcome.
Evidence from other sectors shows the scope for better policing by grasping technological innovation. The use of big data analysis to predict behaviour, whether consumer or institutional, across the private sector is vast and growing. Yet, in crime prevention it remains nascent and siloed. Data remains fragmented between different forces and there is limited access to data from across government and the private sector. The National Policing Digital Strategy 2030 begins to chart such reforms, but it will require political leadership from government to fully transform crime prevention.
A study from Virginia in the US shows the potential on a micro scale. The police rigorously examined data from many previous New Year’s Eves and was able to anticipate when and where future incidents might occur. Resource was deployed accordingly, and the police saw a dramatic reduction in crime on 31st December the following year, as well as saving significant costs. Longer-term trends can also be identified from data: in Texas, software found a link between burglary hotspots and certain house-building specifications. In a community outreach programme, the police were able to focus on the ‘fragile neighbourhoods’ over time to dramatically cut down burglaries. This, again, saved time for officers and money for the taxpayer. In the 1990s CompStat offered digital live record keeping of crime data, and was credited with bringing down crime levels in New York. 30 years later, our capacity to store, process and analyse data has developed beyond expectations and we must now harness this new power.
This means the state must go further. The use of smart devices has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, yet our policing has hardly adapted at all. Data from video doorbells and CCTV remains underused in crime prevention yet is stored on millions of mobile phones. Private security companies state they will contact the police if suspicious behaviour is seen on doorbell cameras for an appropriate monthly fee, but this could soon be within the grasp of the state to achieve for all who want it, if undertaken within an appropriate legal framework and with safeguarding measures.
On social media, many people actively share information about antisocial and criminal behaviour. The victim of crime I met had suffered almost precisely the same burglary at the same time of day, just a few months earlier, and posted about it then. The Facebook comments underneath her post suggested that the same had occurred to others at similar times. Indeed, corporations trawl social media for behavioural insight to improve the ‘customer experience’ and target sales. Any collaboration with social media companies would have to be approached with great care, but if the private sector is able to utilise this kind of data to its own great financial benefit, the state should not cower away – and instead attempt to navigate the inevitable ethical quandaries.
Most controversial, perhaps, is the use of live facial recognition cameras. The potential for technology to help track down criminals and the use of artificial intelligence to free up police time and resource to provide for more community policing – getting police on the streets actively policing our communities once more – is important to grasp. To ignore the advantages of such an innovation would be negligent. But in encouraging advancements, a Labour government must also continue to fervently ensure mechanisms for appropriately handling data and strengthening data protection laws are maintained. This is an innovation that requires great care and consultation, but cannot be ignored.
The great attraction of these technological reforms is that they would enable more traditional policing by increasing efficiency. Cybercrime and fraud are fast-growing phenomena, costing the British economy and taking up huge amounts of police resource. The social and economic cost of fraud is said to be £12.8 billion each year. Companies, such as the British firm DarkTrace, are already using AI to detect and respond to cybercrime. The state should be at the forefront of these changes too.
New technology and policing are not easily intertwined. The practical changes to traditional policing techniques raise some ethical issues, but the power of completely reimagining policing methods, such as machine-led investigation, raises further profound questions. It will require Parliament to grapple with the ethical uncertainties and regulation of AI and potential for discrimination and unfairness, and the well-founded concerns about entrenching racial bias. There are inevitable issues with the rules of evidence and objectivity in the use of machine learning and empowerment. Can, for example, a machine be cross-examined in a court of law? These challenges – academically fascinating but practically fiendish – should not, however, be an insurmountable obstacle to reform. Technological change is happening, whether we like it or not. The issue is whether the police and criminal justice system embrace and utilise this progress, or choose to turn their back because it is too difficult.
Difficult terrain does not mean the government should not proceed. The nineteenth-century Prime Minister and founder of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Peel, said ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’. To police by consent requires trust and faith from the public in those whose job it is to maintain law and order. Trust in the police has rarely been lower than it is today, and there is a risk this covenant may rupture beyond repair. Technology is by no means the only answer, but it must play an important role.