As the capabilities of artificial intelligence rise alongside its adoption by law enforcement, concerns seem to grow in tandem over how said technology and its applications are lacking in oversight and regulation.
There’s a reason why when someone wants to emphasize an endeavor would be arduous and time consuming, they might resort to the idiom ‘it would take an act of Congress,’ because the legislative process often lags years behind contemporary issues. Advents in technology, particularly A.I., are no stranger to this phenomenon.
Scholars, law enforcement experts, and those in the field of protecting civil liberties have been sounding the proverbial alarm as of late that while A.I. is proving beneficial to law enforcement, it also presents some serious concerns regarding limited oversight and policy.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman from the Brennan Center for Justice is among those critics, saying of the current A.I. landscape in law enforcement, “It’s especially concerning sort of the ways that these tools could supercharge that kind of surveillance and enforcement.”
While various iterations of A.I. have been part of policing for decades now when considering early technology in realms like facial recognition systems and fingerprint databases, the speed at which A.I. is currently advancing is unmatched to prior technological eras. Furthermore, the treasure trove of data collected by law enforcement, from BWC footage to traffic surveillance systems, that can be processed by A.I. outpaces the capabilities of entire departments with hypothetically unlimited time to comb through evidence.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, shared those exact sentiments, saying, “A.I. 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.”
Santa Fe Institute’s Cris Moore, who works as a professor and computer scientist at the institute, highlighted the difficulty to implement regulations to “keep up” with how A.I. is advancing, saying, “It’s fair to say that the speed at which technologically created evidence has been adopted, and the aggression with which it’s being pushed makes it hard for the legal community to keep up.”
While police departments across the country have been attempting to craft their own internal policies around the use of A.I., legislators have been trying to address each issue presented by the technology, with varying results. California and Utah are among the states who’ve enacted laws governing the use of A.I. in policing, but said laws revolve heavily around inserting disclosures to when the technology is used in areas like drafting reports.
Meanwhile, while drafted laws are addressing simple disclosures, technology companies in the A.I. space could be on the precipice of ushering in what is being referred to as “agentic policing” – as in a self-driven reasoning technology operating autonomously where evidentiary conclusions could be drawn without human input.
Professor Ferguson says of this possibility, “All that data is going to be dumped into an AI model, and they’re going to query it to say who’s the most likely suspect. The A.I. is going to be running the agentic analysis of it and come up with the answer, and then police and prosecutors have to kind of work backwards to see if it’s accurate.”
According to Professor Ferguson, this mode of operating is antithetical to the traditional investigative process, saying, “We’ve never started with an answer and made people work backwards. There are very real constitutional, statutory and practical risks with this new model of agentic policing.”
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