COMPUTER COPS: Inside the big business of selling AI to the police

COMPUTER COPS: Inside the big business of selling AI to the police

From data gathering to decision making, there’s a gold mine in police funding.

I 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.

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