Category FAQs Search : Smart City
Question: What will be the consequences for policing as cities become increasingly ‘smarter’?
Answer: As cities become ‘smart’, connected and watchful, policing will become a less visible and a more embedded aspect of the urban environment. These developments represent but one more step in the rapid changes brought to policing by the increasing use of digitised data and artificial intelligence. In a smart city, however, we might see some qualitative changes to policing, too. Sensors, artificial intelligence and robotics will lead not just to increased surveillance within a smart city, but the embedding of policing into the built environment. Private and public sources of data will provide the fuel both for the smart city to become more efficient, but also for the increased capacity for the police to detect and react to crime and disorder. These measures will look less like twentiethcentury
coercive policing and more like the models of prevention and apparently consensual control found in private policing. And, because many of the tools of smart-city policing will have been developed by private hands, there will be increased difficulties in maintaining oversight over urban policing. Public officials and judges will be asked to weigh competing values of intellectual-property protection, public-agency transparency and the rights of criminal defendants. These challenges will arise because policing will be a part of the smart city itself.
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(Source: Cambridge University Press, 08 Apr 2020)