The future of preventive policing

Malta’s modern police service is based on the principle of prevention rather than enforcement

The principle of prevention can be seen in the practices and strategies of our modern police. The tremendous elasticity of the term prevention can cause a lot of problems. The term “prevention” is clothed in ambiguity. Crime prevention is an essential part of proactive policing, community policing, proximity policing and all their variants. The main purpose and goal of intelligence-led policing is prevention too. The concept of preventive policing is all-pervasive within our Police Corps.

Prevention (preventive measures) is aimed at preventing situational and direct causes and reasons for the problems of security, liveability and criminality and limiting their consequences. Crime can be reconceptualised as a security risk and insecurity and threats to security are to be prevented too. It can be argued that crime prevention has been securitised. In many security strategies today phenomena like social exclusion, rearing its head in Malta too, is the first priority for prevention, not as the root cause for crime and criminal behaviour but as a security threat as such. This means that preventing social exclusion should be a part of preventive policing as well.

In our national and local level prevention strategies intelligence-led policing and community policing have been reconciled so that they are seen as complementary rather than competitive models. Intelligence and intelligence-management processes (intelligence gathering, strategic analysis, targeting and exchange) improve the capacity of community policing and other preventive policing initiatives. On the other hand, community policing and a good relationship between the police and the public, play an important role in intelligence-led policing because trust and confidence towards the police is a precondition for successful intelligence gathering (especially for gathering community intelligence, which is often tacit knowledge and therefore one of the most

“It is a known fact that our Corps use “Big Data” technologies to collect digital information about almost every aspect of our public and private lives, storing it in large data banks, and processing it, as needed, to extract actionable knowledge, used to solve and prevent crimes.”

important forms of intelligence.

In all probability, in the coming years, we will be having an increase in communities coming from different countries with different cultures and backgrounds. Our current community policing methods might unknowingly entail that the police lack the skills and knowledge about the cultural differences and backgrounds of ethnic groups already interspersed on our Islands. Ethnic communities are usually insular and the language barrier is a significant problem. Community policing officers might feel uncomfortable approaching people in their recent new role and could lose trust, which is the most important precondition in getting community intelligence. Once lost, trust is very difficult to rebuild.

Some elements that will turn future preventive policing into a very challenging exercise are the network structure and model of contemporary prevention, the nature of security knowledge, the national and ambiguous nature of the threats and crimes to be prevented and the emerging possibilities and innovations of virtual preventive policing. Future crime prevention will turn into the promotion and production of security, social cohesion and inclusion. Instead of working on the prevention of something, the Police Corps should, with a big helping hand from government authorities, focus more on making good things happen, security, safety, well-being, in the name of the precautionary principle.

New kinds of innovations will emerge in preventive policing. If not already in place, there will be strategies for the police to be represented on social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Because these are vibrant online meeting places the police can meet young people and chat with them, give advice and listen to their concerns. This should be seen as a new complementary model of community policing, as the internet is today a very popular community. It is what I would call virtual preventive policing or web policing.

It is a known fact that our Corps use “Big Data” technologies to collect digital information about almost every aspect of our public and private lives, storing it in large data banks, and processing it, as needed, to extract actionable knowledge, used to solve and prevent crimes. For example, they can routinely feed data about past crimes into sophisticated learning algorithms to help them “predict” the timing and location of future crimes. I refer to this as digital policing. With the continued growth of digital policing, attention should be focused on a plethora of privacy and criminal procedure issues. But digital policing has other, less obvious, effects on the criminal justice system: on police practices, deterrence policy and substantive criminal law. These collateral effects of digital policing will also have to be carefully analyzed.

Digital policing helps reduce the criminal justice system’s overall complexity, allowing police departments to better deploy their limited resources. Digital policing will increase the overall deterrence of offenders. Embracing preventive policing will make great use of machine learning algorithms to help identify crime hot spots and deploy enforcement personnel. Preventive policing using machine learning casts a wide net. Its goal is to gather large amounts of data in order to learn about the crime environments in which potential offenders operate. Historical data about past crimes, geographical locations and other predictive features could be used to train the algorithms. As new data is fed into the trained algorithms, the programmes will make predictions about geographical areas in which particular types of crimes are likely to occur within set time periods. This allows police departments to deploy personnel in anticipation. However, there are well-known problems with predictive policing learning algorithms, including certain biases that can creep into the algorithms over time.

One consequence is that digital policing will generally require offenders to expend more resources to plan, execute and cover up their crimes. This can lead to increased deterrence of some offenders. Digital policing can also reduce the loss borne by crime victims to the extent that it increases deterrence or leads to an increase in the number of crimes interrupted by the police before the offender can complete them.

Preventive policing in the future will, together with the present system, also be networked, knowledge-led and intelligenceled, effective and outcome-orientated, accountable and legitimate.