AI & LAW ENFORCEMENTPolice Use of Artificial Intelligence Grows as Rules Lag Behind
As law enforcement agencies increasingly embrace AI, some civil liberties advocates, legal scholars and policing experts warn that the technology could amplify surveillance, introduce hidden biases into investigations and make it harder to challenge evidence in court. They also worry about a future in which AI takes on a more active role in policing and criminal investigations.
Hundreds of people fill a downtown street for a protest, waving signs and chanting as they march past businesses and government buildings. Overhead, a police drone records video of the crowd. Nearby traffic cameras and license plate readers capture faces, vehicles and movements along the route.
With artificial intelligence, experts say, hours of footage can be analyzed in minutes, making it easier for police to track or target a participant long after the demonstration ends.
As law enforcement agencies increasingly embrace AI, some civil liberties advocates, legal scholars and policing experts warn that the technology could amplify surveillance, introduce hidden biases into investigations and make it harder to challenge evidence in court. They also worry about a future in which AI takes on a more active role in policing and criminal investigations.
“It’s especially concerning sort of the ways that these tools could supercharge that kind of surveillance and enforcement,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization at the New York University School of Law. Levinson-Waldman has written extensively about the risks of police surveillance and the unregulated use of AI in policing.
Artificial intelligence in policing is not new. For decades, law enforcement agencies have used data-driven and automated tools, including facial recognition systems, automated license plate readers, predictive policing models and video analytics that can flag objects or activity in recorded footage.
What is changing is the speed, scope and complexity of those tools. As police departments accumulate growing volumes of digital evidence — from body camera footage and surveillance video to jail calls, social media records and case files — AI is increasingly being used to help sort, search and analyze that information.
“AI is going to basically be able to sort through otherwise overwhelming amounts of data in ways that we just haven’t seen yet, and give police and prosecutors and the government a lot more power over us in ways that I think will be deeply uncomfortable for many of us,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance,” a book published this year.
