Policing Tool Research Articles

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Predictive Policing in Nigeria: A Qualitative study of law Enforcement Practices in Lagos State

This qualitative study evaluates the effectiveness of predictive policing technologies by examining the implementation within law enforcement operations in Lagos State. The research aims to explore how predictive systems influence crime prevention, and decision-making processes in policing. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with NDLEA officers, the study reveals the perceived benefits and challenges of integrating predictive policing tools into traditional methods. Through thematic analysis of interviews and review of secondary sources, the research identifies key themes such as the tension between technology and human judgement, and the potential for over-reliance on system predictions. The findings indicate that while predictive policing can improve efficiency in crime hotspot identification, its efficacy is undermined by concerns over privacy, and fairness. The study concludes that for predictive policing to be effective, it must come with strong regulatory frameworks and ethical guidelines to ensure support from technologies. This research contributes to the growing discourse on the intersection of technology and law enforcement, offering insights into how predictive policing can evolve to better serve the people.

Analyzing road traffic accidents through identification and prioritization of accident-prone areas on the dembecha to injibara highway segment in amhara region, ethiopia

Every year, millions die in road accidents globally, imposing significant economic and humanitarian costs. While road traffic accidents are a major health concern, many developing countries, including Ethiopia, struggle to address this issue effectively. Ethiopia ranks second in East Africa for severe road traffic accidents, highlighting the need for improved injury reduction strategies. This study introduces a novel approach by chronologically identifying and prioritizing accident black spots in the studied area, Ethiopia. This method provides a valuable tool for transportation authorities and traffic police to target high-risk areas for immediate intervention. Focusing on the Dembecha-Injibara highway segment, the study employs both descriptive and inferential analyses, using the Zegeer method to calculate accident rates. It also uses factors of weight contributing to road traffic accidents and their severity to rank accident-prone areas. The findings reveal that areas near Finote Selam, Banja, and Burie are highly prone to severe accidents, with specific accident frequencies and priority values identified. Recommendations are offered to address these high-risk areas and mitigate severe traffic accidents in the study region.

Leveraging video evidence in domestic violence misdemeanour cases: Examination of case dispositions and case length

Abstract Law enforcement has used video recording devices (e.g. dash camera, body-worn camera) for more than 40 years, with body-worn cameras emerging in 2005 as a policing tool. However, little is known regarding how video evidence is leveraged in case decision-making and outcomes for domestic violence. Law enforcement may use cameras to enhance evidence collection in domestic violence cases, take statements from victims, witnesses, and offenders, record injuries and damages, and document the administration of risk/injury assessments. Preliminary research has indicated video evidence may have strong evidentiary value in domestic violence cases, however, has rarely controlled for other contributing factors. This study furthers our knowledge by examining how video evidence taken by law enforcement impacts case outcomes and length of time to disposition in a sample of closed, misdemeanour domestic violence cases within a large county in a southwestern state. A random sample of cases (n = 612) with and without video evidence were examined for differences in case disposition and case length. Additional evidentiary factors and case characteristics are considered such as prior criminal charges, victim–offender relationship, presence of non-video evidence, presence of witnesses, and gender of offender. Analyses indicate significant differences, such that cases with video evidence are associated with increased guilty pleas, increased convictions, and less time to closure/final case disposition. Findings have implications for the use of video evidence in strengthening the criminal justice response to domestic violence incidents in combination with other case factors.

Creeping Road Traffic Surveillance in Latvia: Social and Legal Implications of Digital Policing Tools

This article critically analyses road traffic surveillance and its social and legal implications, with a focus on the use of digital tools in policing, namely: speed cameras, drones, and a police mobile application in Latvia. Specifically, the article explores: (1) the attributed role of these surveillance tools in terms of caring, preventive, and punitive functions and the potential for function creep and (2) the key challenges these tools pose to fundamental rights and data protection. Thus, it contributes to academic and public debate around the consequences of digital surveillance and embedding democratic governance in policing. The research is based on an exploratory case study that includes analysis of expert interviews, media coverage, the legal framework, and a focus group with traffic participants. We argue that, while the use of these surveillance tools is construed as an example of benevolent and caring surveillance aimed at improving road safety in a preventive manner, it is reliant upon a pronounced punitive dimension that in itself may not be conducive to behavioural change. At the same time, the increasing deployment of all of these tools may lead to function creep and raises challenges for fundamental rights and data protection. While efforts have been made to ensure legitimate use of these tools, not enough attention has been paid to their compliance with data protection requirements. Moreover, there is a need to improve the regulatory framework regarding police use of new surveillance tools, such as drones, which would determine the purposes of such uses and set an obligation to evaluate their effectiveness, impact, and proportionality in order to comply with fundamental rights law and ensure their trustworthy use.

Forensic Robotics: Basic Concepts

The paper emphasizes the increased relevance of the development of special purpose robotic systems that can be used in investigative activities to detect, record and seize traces and other evidence. Taking into account the acceleration of digital transformation of all areas of activity, the author proposes a new private forensic theory of forensic robotics. It is stated that this particular theory has great potential for development into a new branch of forensic technology. The paper discusses the proposed structure of a particular theory, object, subject, general and specific tasks of forensic robotics. Much attention is given to the patterns studied by this particular theory. The author develops his own interpretation of the terms «forensic robot» and «forensic robotic complex». It is stated that police robotics and forensic robotics are used in different, but sometimes overlapping areas. Moreover, the same device can act as a tool for both police and forensic robotics. Summing up the study, the author emphasizes the increased complexity of autonomous forensic robotics and states that within the framework of the proposed theory of forensic robotics, general recommendations should be developed to minimize errors and problems when using both an autonomous programmable robot and a robot equipped with artificial intelligence.

‘Crisis’, control and circulation: Biometric surveillance in the policing of the ‘crimmigrant other’

Automated facial recognition, the use of dactyloscopic data and advanced forensic DNA analyses are becoming dominant technological surveillance means for ‘crimmigration’ control. ‘Crimmigration’ describes the increasing criminalisation of migration, based on a perceived ‘crisis’ of mass migration and its assumed negative impact on national stability and welfare, materialising in overlapping crime and migration control regimes. We analyse the policing of migration through biometric technologies as the reproduction of social practices of security against crime. By combining concepts of social practices and ethical regimes, we suggest that biometric ethical regimes are constituted by social practices working towards legitimising the use of biomaterials and biodata. This analytical synthesis supports us in exploring how biometric technologies deployed in the policing of crime circulate into the policing of migration and vice versa. First, technologies as materials (DNA, fingerprints, facial images, analysis kits, databases, etc.) are inscribed with assumptions about validating identity and suspicion, and are increasingly made accessible as data across policy domains. Second, forensic competence moves in abstracted forms of expertise independent of context and ethics of application, creating challenges for reliable and legitimate technology deployment. Third, biometric technologies, often portrayed as reliable, useful, accurate policing tools, travel from crime into migration control with meanings that construct generalised criminal suspicion of migrants. To evidence the complexity and difficulty of achieving accountability and responsibility for the ethical governance of biometric technologies in policing, we trace how the goals, risks, benefits and values of biometric technologies are framed, and how the legitimacy of their deployment in policing of migration is constructed and negotiated.

Politics of “Localised Legitimacy”, Vigilantism, Non-State Policing and Counter-Banditry in Northwest Nigeria: Evidence from the Epicenter

Northwest Nigeria has been devastated by armed banditry, with Zamfara state being the epicenter of the crisis. The use of vigilantes in non-state policing against armed banditry has accorded legitimacy to these groups. However, their activities also pose significant challenges. Where scholarly work has examined the legitimacy of vigilantes, the focus has mostly been on legitimacy derived from the nation-state. This paper, contributes to the literature by interrogating the legitimacy of vigilantism as a non-state policing tool toward countering armed banditry, derived from affected local communities in Zamfara state.

The Dilemma of Digital Colonialism unmasking facial recognition technology and data sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand

Law enforcement agencies have become increasingly reliant upon facial recognition technology (FRT) as a powerful surveillance tool in the fight against crime. Developing at an unprecedented rate, FRT has exceeded the incremental pace of law and policy. This has resulted in unregulated over-surveillance, triggering questions about police misconduct and ethnic discrimination. In Aotearoa New Zealand, targeted surveillance and the emergence of FRT have reignited concerns over inherent colonialist practices, dismissive of obligations to te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori rights. They have also provided for a new wave of discussion on how future policy might incorporate Māori data sovereignty. While a highly valuable policing tool, its lack of regulation, technological accuracy and potential racial bias have led some countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, to impose a moratorium on FRT use in law enforcement. Policymakers must now look at how to dismantle what is fast becoming an age of digital colonialism.

Building the case for restricted use of predictive policing tools in India

The use of predictive policing by law enforcement agencies has lately proliferated across several states in India. Predictive policing uses machine learning models to analyse substantial amounts of crime data to map and predict crimes, offenders, identities of the perpetrators and victims of crime. The aim is to enable the efficient allocation of limited resources at the disposal of law enforcement agencies for crime prevention. However, evidence suggests that predictive policing, in its current form, suffers from serious limitations. Inferior quality datasets are being used to train algorithms and citizens are unable to contest inaccurate algorithmic outcomes that could lead to their preventive detentions, often to the detriment of criminal justice norms and constitutional fundamental rights of citizens. More importantly, in the absence of oversight mechanisms restricting its use, the use of predictive policing has ended up reinforcing and amplifying police biases in law enforcement. This paper focuses, in particular, on the many ways in which predictive policing increases the risk of preventive detentions under section 151 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1973 and proposes recommendations to preclude possibilities of unlawful preventive detentions using predictive policing tools. In part 1, the paper reviews the practice of preventive detention of potential offenders by the police in India—under section 151 of the CrPC. In part 2, I build the case for restricted use of predictive policing tools to only predict the location, type and time of the crime and not potential offenders or victims. In the last part, I recommend substantive measures and procedural safeguards to secure the reliable and accountable use of place-based predictive policing tools in India.

Efficiency of Algorithmic Policing Tools: a nod to C.N. Parkinson

Efficiency of Algorithmic Policing Tools: a nod to C.N. Parkinson

Derivative Action- An Impartial Right given to Minority Shareholders under Pakistan’s Legislation

Derivative Action- An Impartial Right given to Minority Shareholders under Pakistan’s Legislation

Automated facial recognition and policing: a Bridge too far?

AbstractAutomated facial recognition (AFR) is perhaps the most controversial policing tool of the twenty-first century. Police forces in England and Wales, and beyond, are using facial recognition in various contexts, from evidence gathering to the identification and monitoring of criminal suspects. Despite uncertainty regarding its accuracy, and widespread concerns about its impact on human rights and broader social consequences, the rise of police facial recognition continues unabated by law. Both the Government and the domestic courts were satisfied that police use of this technology is regulated adequately by existing statutory provisions regulating the processing of data and police surveillance generally. That is, until the recent judgment of the Court of Appeal in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police and Others [2020] EWCA Civ 1058, where it was held that the respondent's use of AFR was unlawful. This paper provides an analysis of AFR, reflecting on the outcome of that case and evaluates its nuanced findings. We suggest that the judgment leaves considerable room for police AFR to continue with only minor, piecemeal amendment to the legal framework. Drawing on comparative experience and relevant socio-legal scholarship, we argue that the relatively unfettered rise of police facial recognition in England and Wales illuminates deeper flaws in the domestic framework for fundamental human rights protection and adjudication, which create the conditions for authoritarian policing and surveillance to expand.

Body-worn cameras, police violence and the politics of evidence: A case of ontological gerrymandering

Public demands for greater police accountability, particularly in relation to violence targeting Black and Brown communities, have placed pressure on law enforcement organisations to be more transparent about officers’ actions. The implementation of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has become a popular response. This article examines the embrace of BWCs amidst the wider shift toward evidence-based policing by scrutinising the body of research that evaluates the effects of these technologies. Through an intertextual analysis informed by insights from Critical Race Theory and Science and Technology Studies, we illustrate how the privileging of certain forms of empiricism, particularly randomised controlled trials, evinces what Woolgar and Pawluch describe as ontological gerrymandering. In doing so, the emergent evidence base supporting BWCs as a policing tool constitutively redefines police violence into a narrow conceptualisation rooted in encounters between citizens and police. This analysis examines how these framings, by design, minimise racialised power relations and inequalities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these evidence-based claims, arguing that they can direct attention away from – and thus can buttress – the structural conditions and institutions that perpetuate police violence.

EU PROPHETS project on policing tools for terrorism

Dr. Antonio Sanchez Ortega presented the findings from the PROPHETS research project on November 26, 2020, at the 2020 CASIS Vancouver West Coast Security Conference. He discussed the factors that lead to radicalization and the incitement of violence and the PROPHETS research project tools that were developed.

Digital Policing Tools as Social Control Technologies: Data-driven Predictive Algorithms, Automated Facial Recognition Surveillance, and Law Enforcement Biometrics

Digital Policing Tools as Social Control Technologies: Data-driven Predictive Algorithms, Automated Facial Recognition Surveillance, and Law Enforcement Biometrics

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin Jennifer L. Lieberman Ruha Benjamin, ed. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 416 pp. $29.95. Captivating Technology is a rigorous, imaginative, and impressively multifarious collection of essays. Composed of fourteen chapters, plus a Foreword and Introduction, it astutely critiques different aspects of science and technology that relate to carcerality—and it moves beyond criticism to identify techniques for liberation and resistance. It offers essential contributions to critical race studies, American studies, and science and technology studies. Troy Duster provides the Foreword, illuminating that the racial bias that gets coded into algorithms is only visible within specific cultural contexts. Ruha Benjamin elaborates on this point in her Introduction, "Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination," by defining what she calls "The New Jim Code": the use of technologies and policies that appear objective but deceptively extend racist social practices. Benjamin is a master of turning presumptions on their heads, asking such evocative questions as, "Could it be that we don't need technocorrections to make us secure, that we need social insecurity to justify technocorrections?" (2). The chapters that follow share Benjamin's innovative and attentive analysis. They are organized into three parts. "Part I: Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison" begins with a chapter by Britt Rusert: "Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation." This chapter sheds light on the presumptions about blackness and hygiene that informed public health efforts at Tuskegee, ranging from Booker T. Washington's "Negro Health Week" to the notorious syphilis study. Rusert suggests that Walter Rodney's thesis about the underdevelopment of Africa might be expanded to include "uneven development" within the United States (39). This chapter also includes a reading of Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Tales (1899), which suggests that "African American literature exposed the logic and history of the Tuskegee syphilis study decades before they were uncovered" (41). For example, Rusert argues that Chesnutt's story "Po' Sandy" narrativizes how the plantation functions as a laboratory: By turning into a tree that can be milled into lumber, Po' Sandy allegorizes "how black bodies continued to be acted upon as commodifiable" even after emancipation (43). The second chapter, "Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries" by Christopher Perreira, also considers fiction as an important object of historical inquiry as it reads Alejandro Morales's The Captain of All These Men of [End Page 258] Death in conversation with the "discourses of racialized disease" that were promulgated within the context of "California public health" (52). The third chapter, "Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance" by Anthony Ryan Hatch, confronts the little-studied issue of food in prisons. Ryan analyzes everything from the prison farm to the hunger strike, and from the software companies that win exclusive contracts (which are appallingly unregulated by the FDA or USDA) to supply food to prisoners as cheaply as possible to the dubiously hopeful act of food hacking. Chapters four and five both analyze predictive policing. Andrea Miller's "Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption" interprets preemptive policing tools such as license-plate readers and PredPol predictive policing software in Atlanta as part of "a speculative military economy" (94). R. Joshua Scannell's "This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism" also examines such tools as PredPol and HunchLab, putting them in conversation with Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story "The Minority Report" and its whitewashed filmic adaptation to interrogate the racial and economic logics that underwrite the assumption that crime can be preempted. Scannell compellingly argues that "Policing does not have a 'racist history.' Policing makes race" (108). "Part II: Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion" begins with chapter six, "Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy" by Winifred R. Poster. This chapter introduces the useful theoretical concept of "multi-surveillance," which connotes how "consumers [who] may be unified in their aims to counteract surveillance by firms … may surveill [sic] each other for factors like race" (135). Poster...

The Missing Algorithm: Safeguarding Brady Against the Rise of Trade Secrecy in Policing

Trade secrecy, a form of intellectual property protection, serves the important societal function of promoting innovation. But as police departments across the country increasingly rely on proprietary technologies like facial recognition and predictive policing tools, an uneasy tension between due process and trade secrecy has developed: to fulfill Brady’s constitutional promise of a fair trial, defendants must have access to the technologies accusing them, access that trade secrecy inhibits. Thus far, this tension is being resolved too far in favor of the trade secret holder—and at too great an expense to the defendant. The wrong balance has been struck. This Note offers three contributions. First, it explains the use of algorithms in law enforcement and the intertwined role of trade secrecy protections. Second, it shows how trade secrecy clashes with the Due Process Clause—the Constitution’s mechanism for correcting the power asymmetry between the state and the defendant—and argues that due process should not waver simply because a source of evidence is digital, not human. Third, it proposes a solution that better balances a defendant’s due process rights with intellectual property protections.

Predictive policing: The risks associated with risk assessment

Focusing on the Dutch tools SyRI and CAS, this paper describes predictive policing against the background of the broader development toward a pre-crime society, the accompanying culture of control and the new penal logic it gives rise to. It will explain the risks associated with the risk assessments predictive policing tools provide and end with the recommendation to use predictive policing not only for police deployment, but also to target problem-oriented responses to crime to the right persons and places.

\u201cPick up anything that moves\u201d: a qualitative analysis of a police crackdown against people who use drugs in Tijuana, Mexico

BackgroundHomeless people who use drugs (PWUD) are often displaced, detained, and/or forced into drug treatment during police crackdowns. Such operations follow a zero-tolerance approach to law enforcement and have a deleterious impact on the health of PWUD. In Mexico, municipal police officers (MPOs) conducted the largest crackdown documented at the Tijuana River Canal (Tijuana Mejora) to dismantle an open drug market. We analyzed active-duty MPOs’ attitudes on the rationale, implementation, and outcomes of the crackdown. We also included the involvement of non-governmental allies in the disguised imprisonment as drug treatment referral and potential legal consequences of having illegally detained PWUD.MethodsBetween February–June 2016, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with MPOs in Tijuana. Interviews were transcribed, translated and coded using a consensus-based approach. Emergent themes, trends and frameworks were analyzed through a hermeneutic grounded theory protocol.ResultsParticipants recognized the limitations of Tijuana Mejora in effectively controlling crime and addressing drug treatment solutions. MPOs perceived that the intent of the operation was to displace and detain homeless PWUD, not to assist or rehabilitate them. The police operation was largely justified as a public safety measure to reduce the risk of injury due to flooding, decrease drug consumption among PWUD and protect local tourism from PWUD. Some participants perceived the crackdown as a successful public health and safety measure while others highlighted occupational risks to MPOs and potential human rights violations of PWUD.ConclusionsTijuana Mejora illustrated why public and private actors align in enforcing zero-tolerance drug policy. Perceptions of care are often based on captivity of the diseased, not in health and well-being of PWUD. Officer perceptions shed light on the many limitations of this punitive policing tool in this context. A shift towards evidence-based municipal strategies to address drug use, wherein police are perceived as partners in harm reduction rather than antagonists, is warranted.

Tech Tackles Violent Crime

KNIFE CRIME offences in the UK rose by 7 per cent in the 12 months to the end of June 2019, reaching a record high. It's a worrying trend, both in itself and because it makes people feel less safe on the streets. But there are advanced technological solutions to halting attacks, including the use of controversial predictive policing tools.