Defund the Police as a movement, amid a surge in crimes of violence, seems more like a cry for help rather than a well-thought out policy. Realistically, it was likely the product of “group polarization”, a theory posited by Cass Sunstein, et. al., that predicts that when groups deliberate on a topic, they tend to move as a group toward the polar end of the topic responses or solutions.1 So likely the group discussion around “defund the police” did not start with this polar extreme solution, in direct contraindication of scientific studies. It appears that the group polarization theory is the best explanation for this slogan/policy, because studies indicate it is contrary to the solutions they seek, and deadly for the populations they seek to protect.
In fact, one of the few studies that disaggregated race data found that:
. . . . expanding police personnel leads to reductions in serious crime. With respect to homicide, we find that every 10-17 officers hired abate one new homicide per year. In per capita terms the effects are approximately twice as large for Black victims. In short, larger police forces save lives and the lives saved are disproportionately Black lives.2
After a year or more of implementing the “defund the police” policy. eliminating new positions and entire police departments as in Minneapolis, the reality of the results of this policy bear out the scientific studies. Crime predictably increased. Cities began to frantically try to recover their police departments.3
Violent crime is increasing
Reducing violent crime requires hiring 10-17 officers to reduce one homicide,4 and homicides are on the rise. In 2020, the number of murders per 100,000 people — rose sharply, by nearly 30 percent. Assaults increased as well, with the rate of offenses rising by more than 10 percent—-yet property crimes fell by 8 percent.5 Significant increase in crimes of violence but fewer property crimes? It would seem to be a call for focus on violent criminals and their incarceration and rehabilitation. We see the expectation of safety of families and individuals being sacrificed in an Orwellian, socialist Movement.
The primary purpose in government for which its citizens and residents give up some of their autonomy is in exchange for protection. A government that fails to protect its citizens has failed. I am reminded of the still memorable words of Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR Communist Party Chair, in 1956 when he said, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within....” We may be doing it ourselves with or without the help of Russia.
Some think the crime rate is due to reduced prosecutions and in cities where cashless bail gets criminals (including violent ones) shuffled back to their way of life as quickly as possible, and that can certainly contribute to the increase in violent crimes rate. Perhaps it is a consequence of the pandemic and an unintended consequence of lockdown policies for long periods of time.6
The Defund the Police movement gained momentum7 with its ideas about shifting money from police officers to social workers and mental health professionals which is based on scientific evidence according to some scholars.8 Cities rushed to follow suit in Minneapolis, known for its summer of violence after the George Floyd incident,9 triggering a nationwide serge in violent crime and property crime. But overall crime decreased during the lockdown orders. See the econofact chart below:10
If we explore this idea, we have to consider that when someone calls about a violent neighbor brandishing a gun in their face in their apartment hallway, maybe they could put their phone on speaker and the mental health professional could talk to the assailant about his mother, and change his mind about the assault. Or should there be more time, send a psychologist to the location to personally talk to the assailant, presumably they will give the psychologist a bullet proof vest at police headquarters — if they have enough of a budget to buy them? But do we want to expose social workers and mental health professionals to violent criminals holding a gun when they arrive on the scene? Hiring fewer police officers means that the psychologist will go it alone.
Introducing, Sadie.
Sadie is a robotic dog (of my imagining) with artificial intelligence that can take down a violent criminal after running through an algorithm of millions of cases where force is required. The take down can involve mechanical action of pinning the criminal to the ground, while impervious to gunshot wounds with its titanium shell. Sadie can shift to control in military-like fashion back at headquarters by robotic drone controllers (former street-assigned police officers) at a master keyboard and screen.
Dog robots may be less threatening than a humanoid, Star Wars-like police robot with a laser rifle. These dogs would not be visibly armed, but should have a taser and tranquilizer darts on board, for ready deployment to subdue an assailant. A robotic administration mechanism for Naloxone for fentanyl overdoses would be a good addition. This is not so sci-fi as you might first imagine ---the Boston Dynamics robotic dog is currently being used in the Ukraine-Russia War with a machine gun mounted on its back.11
George Lucas’s very first film, written while in film school, is insightfully dystopic into the future of policing. It is an amazing sci-fi film you have probably never heard of — THX 1138, named for the lead character who resists the state control over his mind. The police are all robots and use psychological means to control even the slightest deviation from a happy society. Here’s a clip of one of the scenes where the character THX 1138 is undergoing an adjustment from the police.
The BMI Solution
What next? A body-machine-interface (BMI) solution might follow the robots, when everyone decides something like Alexa (one of many in-home devices that hears and speaks to us about what we need to order or music we want to play) connected to our body that will monitor what we say and do so that an appropriate intervention can be staged by the social workers or “violence interrupters”12. Or just our smartphone.
Maybe we can prevent crimes from happening by anticipating them based on artificial intelligence algorithms that are trained to see the complexity of factors that lead to a violent crime, and notify authorites. This may sound like dystopic sci-fi but it has already been implemented in many police departments including some in the UK.13 But then we have moved on to the next sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where mutant humans can predict who will commit a crime. Alexa can do that for us, now; with the properly trained algorithm to respond to voice patterns, volume and tone of voice and speech content, or even ordering habits. No need for mutant humans. A new algorithm predicts future crimes one week in advance with 90% accuracy.14 Predicting and preventing crimes is a utopian idea, but at what cost to the other 10%?
Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement
Already AI is being used to analyze faces in video and still photos at a rate impossible for a human. This technology is flawed with its inability to distinguish faces with darker colored skintones, but is improving.
AI is being used for deconvolution of DNA from crime scenes and medical examiners where DNA becomes mixed, making traditional methods impossible to sort out individual donors. AI can shift through these complex analyses. Gunshot patterns can be assessed using AI in determining direction and type which would be useful in a mass shooter incident among many other scenarios, both real time and as evidentiary functions.15 It is fair to say we have just begun to utilize artificial intelligence in law enforcement and its fairness and equity is only as good as it can be trained. Using experience police officers in assessing the outcomes of the AI is going to be critical to the development of these tools. There is the problem of using data that is biased, as in the study where 9 out of 13 police departments found to have biased practices, used that same data to train their algorithms.16 But will they ever have machine to human capability of exercising human compassion and judgment?
Dubai has already implemented the robotic police officer to carry out tasks like take paperwork for crimes and accept payment of fines. Dubai expects to have 25% of its police force replaced by robots by 2030.17 Dubai's robotic police officer was featured on the cover of Police Chief Magazine, a publication of the International Association of Police Chiefs, in March 2020, below.
A panel of police chiefs convened in December 2019 concluded about the use of technology in law enforcement:
The panel’s response was universal in its opinion that technology could reduce costs by transitioning tasks now done by humans to automated systems. The panel also felt using technology would reduce claims of bias currently plaguing police contacts with community members.18
The ARGUS-IS system (high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles with an Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) mounted under the drone) once focused on a meter, but now can zoom in at 30 cm distance, which is refined enough to spot the outline of a handheld weapon, track vehicles and any pedestrian movement.19
The example of the autonomous vehicle which uses artificial intelligence to assess its every move and turn, can make mistakes no human would make in judgment. Despite advances in these vehicles, one of them mistook the side of an 18-wheeler truck for the sky and literally ran right through it. Another vehicle being used as an Uber in Phoenix, hit a pedestrian that any human would likely have avoided.
The unintended consequences
Artificial intelligence has already pervaded society and law enforcement is already undergoing a transformation that is not being noticed. It is only going to become more embedded and useful to law enforcement and focus should be on its development.
Police as a profession has been impacted by the “defund the police movement” not by improvement but by instilling reluctance to respond to 9-1-1 calls for fear of the uncertainty in street crime which could mean the end of their career or life, all for $50,000 a year.20 Simultaneously it is driving people from the profession, and causing a drop in qualified new applicants. In addition, random violence against police officers has continued to escalate since the start of the Movement.
Focusing on movements like “defund the police” is a distraction from improving, training and transforming what is already taking place in artificial intelligence. Using AI and robotic police is likely in our future, but “defund the police” slogans take us in a wrong direction where excessive use of the Dubai-model of police robots will cause us to lose human contact and relationships with neighborhoods and organizations.
As we slip into the unintended consequences of losing touch with neighborhoods by human presence on their streets and humanism in making split second decisions to assimilate human logic with all we know about being human, we lose the humanism skills needed in a violent situation. Both for those who are harmed as well as those harming others.
The focus we should have is how to better use technology to accomplish the goals of policing without endangering police or the public. Prevention technology is tantalizing improving, calling for ever more vigilance for privacy. These are the things we need to discuss as society, to make things better while avoiding the “group polarization” effect.
Be careful what you wish for, and may we focus on the right things to make things better.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/542/ (1999).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-reverse-defunding-the-police-amid-rising-crime-11622066307
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myths-and-realities-understanding-recent-trends-violent-crime
https://econofact.org/crime-in-the-time-of-covid
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/defund-the-police
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/05/19/7-myths-about-defunding-the-police-debunked/
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/minneapolis-may-end-its-police-department-will-other-cities-follow-suit/579314/
https://econofact.org/crime-in-the-time-of-covid
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gv33/robot-dog-not-so-cute-with-submachine-gun-strapped-to-its-back
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/18/fact-check-did-minneapolis-city-council-defund-the-police
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings
https://scitechdaily.com/ai-algorithm-predicts-future-crimes-one-week-in-advance-with-90-accuracy/
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/252038.pdf
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/13/137444/predictive-policing-algorithms-ai-crime-dirty-data/
Swapna Krishna, “Dubai Hopes to Have a Human-Free Police Station by 2030,” Engadget, May 22, 2017.
https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/publicity-sunlight-and-the-electric-light/
https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/publicity-sunlight-and-the-electric-light/
https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries
Totally agree with your approach!
Yes, totally agree that the "defund the police" movement is an ill-conceived, knee-jerk reaction to police-involved killings of unarmed civilians. However, the other issue is the militarization of local police, especially using federal funds or military equipment that is designed for the battlefield. The use of deadly force by police, rather than de-escalation of situations, has tragic consequences. Police should take lessons from employees of Waffle House or McDonald's, who are often better at diffusing potentially dangerous customers! Retraining should be key, along with (of course) better pay. Just my two cents.