Facing the Future of Crime: A Framework for Police Use of Technology

The world is changing, and the pace of change accelerating. Sometimes there are unintended consequences to technological change that may pose existential threats, or create opportunities for crime. In terms of tackling crime, understanding what these threats are and addressing them, or mitigating their impact, is of vital importance.

Technology does not just facilitate crime. It offers solutions. There will likely always be a need for law enforcement to play a role in crime reduction and to do so, police and others will need to continue to embrace emerging technologies.

Technology and crime threats

For many technologies there exist few regulations regarding crime and security. As such, we have seen many examples of ‘crime harvests’, whereby offenders exploit a vulnerability in a product or service, such as online shoppingsuch as in online banking.

There is a considerable asymmetry in the speed with which offenders exploit crime opportunities and governments can pass legislation. Consider smart speakers and smart doorbells, which collect, store and communicate sensitive data. If compromised, these would threaten owners’ security.

For these types of products, in 2023 the UK Department for Culture Music and Sport introduced two pieces of legislation with the aim of making such products “secure by design”. In an ideal world, such legislation would be introduced prior to the launch of products and be future-proofed. Foresight is required.

(Generative) artificial intelligence

The evolution and pace of change in generative artificial intelligence (hereafter GenAI) is quite startling. Could this technology be misused? Yes; there are concerns about chatbots such as ChatGPT including bias, disinformation, over-reliance, privacy, cybersecurity, proliferation, and more. While guardrails have been implemented, those who seek to exploit this technology will, of course, likely find ways to circumvent solutions.

Potential crimes include audio/video impersonation that uses GenAI for the purposes of committing fraud, including virtual or fake kidnappings; the use of driverless cars as weapons; the use of GenAI to conduct phishing attacks at scale; GenAI authored fake news; and the use of AI to harvest content with which to blackmail people.

One positive development took place in November 2023 at the AI Safety Summit in the UK. This was the signing by twenty-eight countries of the Bletchley Declaration. However, such action would ideally have been taken almost half a decade ago.

Quantum computing

One of the threats that quantum computers pose is the decryption of sensitive data, which could range from personal information to state secrets. In the future, one might use quantum computers to encrypt data. However, as this is not currently possible, any data that is captured now by hostile states or organised crime groups may be vulnerable to decryption in the future. Addressing the threats that it poses will require action now.

Ill prepared

Unfortunately, UK policing has historically been ill prepared. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on Policing for the Future reported that “Forces’ investment in and adoption of new technology is suffering from a complete lack of coordination and leadership, which is badly letting down police officers, who are struggling to do their jobs with out-of-date technology”. More recently, and as a positive step, there was the appointment of National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the first UK Police Chief Science Adviser in 2021, and the establishment of the Police Science Advisory Council.

Evidence frameworks

There exist evidence frameworks for summarising what works in crime reduction that have been developed for practitioners. One forms the basis of the UK College of Policing's Crime Reduction toolkit. This framework has five dimensions that stand for effect-mechanism-moderator-implementation-economics (EMMIE). Consider how the evidence on the use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) is rated on the toolkit. EMMIE analysis suggests that there is reliable evidence on the effect of BWCs on reducing complaints against the police, but not on crime. However, evidence on how it works, how to implement it and how cost effective it is, is weak to non-existent. In designing a framework for new technologies intended to address future crimes, it is important to consider the elements that are not covered in approaches such as EMMIE. Emerging technologies such as GenAI and quantum computing have received little to no attention from reviews which often focus on tried and tested interventions.

Introducing CRIMEFACE

We present a first iteration of a framework with the acronym CRIMEFACE which reviews the evidence we have on relevant new technologies in terms of:

1. Crime reduction outcomes.
2. Reactions/Public perception outcomes including perceptions of legitimacy, public trust, and explainability.
3. Implementation considerations, such as ease of integration with current systems, knowledge/expertise requirements and security culture maturity level requirements.
4. Misuses/ potential backfire effects.
5. Economics to include value for money and cost effectiveness.
6. Future proof-ability, such as whether technology will stay current or go obsolete quickly.
7. Adaptability—what are the crime reduction mechanisms? Are there multiple mechanisms? How generalisable is it to different environments?
8. Contextual differences, both physical and online, in implementation, outcome and public reaction.
9. Ethical considerations of use, which should be transparent and fair, proportionate, non-discriminatory and unbiased, comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, be evaluated, consider future legal implications of its use, and responsibly consider carbon costs and sustainability.

An obvious question is where to look for evidence; or, if the evidence does not exist, which approaches might be best used to gather it? This will include the use of more qualitative expert opinion-based evidence; there will rarely be ‘hard data’. Expert consensus techniques, surveys with samples of the public and focus groups with citizen panels might be used.

We are not the first to have discussed issues with new technologies and crime—but we hope that thinking can be turned to these now so that we are the last that need to do so.