Police and tech: Combine with care
The lethal police robot used in Dallas was a belated wakeup call: New technologies are on the cusp of fundamentally changing the way cops take on crime and terrorism in our cities.
Most of the focus in political debate of late has been on whether the federal Defense Department should continue to sell surplus gear to local police departments, with a sprinkling of debate about how to crack cell-phone encryption. Those are myopic ways to frame the issue.
Just as the camera phone made every traffic stop a potential Facebook share, cheaper, exponentially better and faster tech will make policing easier and more efficient.
The new gadgets and tactics have the potential save lives. The question is how we maintain privacy and safety for both cops and the folks they interact with daily.
If people worried about cameras on buildings being invasive — and they did — what will they think when police can watch an entire city from the air? When our every move is tracked from subway stop to subway stop? And how will the courts fit the new technologies into our increasingly arcane constitutional framework?
A quick primer on what’s coming down the pike:
Twenty years ago, the best a computer could do is maintain a report log. Now, computers can send police to high-risk areas before crime happens. This tech, called predictive policing — NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is a big fan — uses algorithms to find hotspots in a city and get patrols on the scene before anything goes down.
A few states, including California, Washington and Missouri, are already trying it. New York is getting a taste thanks to a company called PredPol. It breaks cities into 500-square-foot areas and gives each chunk a separate rating. As crime builds up, the system can show exactly where crime has happened and identify where it might happen again. Assume it’s effective. Is it fair? For a broader view, police will soon have access to wide-area surveillance systems. These tools, developed by companies like Persistent Surveillance Systems, use planes or even drones to create a constantly updated map of a city. The map, recorded at very high resolution, lets police literally follow a single car — or person — from the scene of a crime.
It’s already been tested in the Middle East and in smaller U.S. cities and could be rolled out in bigger cities with the budget to keep a plane in the air all day and night.
A police drone constantly circling overhead might comfort a resident of lower Manhattan — but again, at what cost? The police use of warrantless Stingray devices to home in on the location of cell phones has already been rebuked by the courts.
Better and cheaper cameras are also making it easier for onthe-ground facial recognition. The FBI has built up a huge database of faces; so has the NYPD. By following a person in the crowd, police may before long be able to pinpoint exactly where a suspect is hiding.
Imagine this tech aboard body-worn cop cameras — which Black Lives Matter activists see as a critical part of the solution to the problems they’ve been highlighting — and you get a complex hybrid that reformers won’t know whether to cheer or decry.
Which brings us to the use of force. Prepare to see an growing army of robots, some of which have the power to hurt or kill. And while tools like the Taser have been around for decades, more effective versions are helping to ensure that police can trust their “conducted electrical weapons” as much as their sidearms.
It makes sense: Why risk an officer’s life, or a suspect’s, unless it’s necessary? But at some point we have yet to define, robots and nonlethal weapons become too sophisticated for the common good.
“While technology is crucial to law enforcement, it is never a panacea,” wrote the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in its final report last year. True. The question is when, if ever, too much technology becomes a bad thing.
A tricky balance