How AI-powered policing is endangering the public’s trust in police

Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated the cultural landscape.

Uptake across various sectors, including law enforcement , quickly followed, usually with minimal foresight and little to no guardrails, like effective policies or laws, to govern AI use.

The largely unregulated use of AI in law enforcement is deeply concerning; it jeopardizes police legitimacy and could compromise the integrity of the justice system because it means the public cannot trust that evidence used by police is not compromised by AI .

Read more: AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention Procedural justice, or the perception of fairness, is key to police legitimacy.

It’s maintained both through unbiased law enforcement practices and the sharing of accurate information with the public and courts.

It’s well documented that AI programming is rife with bias and distortions of information.

Evidence even suggests that AI bias can be “ worse than reality .” While debates about bias and problems with AI are ongoing, it’s clear that the selective use of AI by police is inherently biased and must therefore immediately cease.

AI creep into policing Police use of technology to manipulate evidence is developing into a standardized practice in law enforcement, due primarily to how easy it is for anyone to use AI.

In June, for example, a front-line senior detective in the United Kingdom improperly used AI to “create evidential material in a number of cases.” Police in the United States and Canada , meanwhile, have officially published AI-generated images of drug bust seizures.

The continued integration of AI into facial recognition and surveillance technologies has also raised concerns over the dangers of misidentification .

AI is known to be more likely wrong than correct in identifying images of women and people with darker skin tones .

Earlier this year, police in North Dakota used AI facial recognition to misidentify a Tennessee grandmother for crimes that she didn’t commit; as a result, she was held in custody for more than five months.

In Maryland late last year, an officer drew a gun on an unsuspecting teenager because an AI-driven high school surveillance system had misidentified a bag of chips as a possible firearm.

These cases, among others, illustrate the dangers of AI use in law enforcement.