INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What are the goals of Police Futurists International?
Answer
Police Futurist International is a relatively new group that grew out of a meeting of
people at the FBI Academy and academics, people involved in law enforcement and related
fields, concerned about looking to the future in law enforcement and taking a more
strategic view of what regards futures issues and technology. It is an organization that
has specific requirements for membership, a certain kind of training and education.
Largely it is made up of law enforcement practitioners and academics in that particular
area. The goal is to educate all the law enforcement practitioners and the public at large
about futures issues, and where we are going with the criminal organized system is some of
the issues we face in the future.
Question 2
What are the benefits of emerging technologies as far as policing is concerned?
Answer
There are a lot of fascinating things going on with technology that we would describe as
either emerging or going to be emerging in the next five to ten years, that hold a lot of
promise for law enforcement in a number of different areas. We could talk about less than
lethal weapons, or there’s a lot of work going on right now at the National Law
Enforcement Technology Center, trying to identify more humane ways for law enforcement
officers to disable or to temporarily stun the suspects, so we can avoid using deadly
force or using excessive force in causing a lot of injuries. There are a number of
technologies in that area; one that is probably most promising now is laser technology,
using green and red lasers to either temporarily stun the suspect, or in the case of the
red laser to temporarily blind the suspect, so that the suspect can be disabled with
little damage. The National Law Enforcement Technology Center is working to verify medical
safety, and there will be a capability in the future for law enforcement officers to use
these technologies to put a kind of a stun grenade into a room and protect the police
officers from its effects, but stun the suspects in the room, and take them into custody
without anybody getting injured.
Question 3
Do you think there might be some risks, ethical or whatever, posed by these emerging
technologies?
Answer
Absolutely. We talked about less-than-lethal technologies but there are all sorts of other
technologies out there, to do with positive identification, DNA issues, biometrics, the
practice of identifying people from the body characteristics, speech recognition, truth
detection based on speech. We need to be concerned about when they are used, and how, and
that we are using technology to help improve public safety, not to unfringe people’s
constitutional rights, invade their privacy, and harm the foundations that our country was
built on.
One example that we didn’t talk about before is the growing area of biometrics.
There is one particular technology that has to do with face recognition by a computer, and
right now it is being experimented with automated telemachines in banks, and it is
available for law enforcement. As this becomes more sophisticated, then a positive
identification is going to be that much easier, and one can envision a situation where a
police officer in the field in the future, armed with some type of camera or device, will
be able to positively identify a person, simply by looking at them. If you tie that
together with police databases and information, things like that, I believe there are
privacy implications.
Question 4
There has been, both in Italy and in the United States, a wide debate about the issues of
censorship and privacy in new technologies, especially as far the Internet is concerned.
What do you think that the new technologies will bring forth about these issues?
Answer
We have two technology issues, actually three, raging in the United States right now.
United States Congress passed a Decency Bill a numbers of years ago, that attempted to
regulate pornography and things like that on the Internet, and it was struck out as being
unconstitutional by our Supreme Court. Basically, the Internet is the ultimate free
speech; there are some other bills in Congress to attempt to regulate pornography again,
but I am not sure how they are going to be met, because a lot of groups of what they call
"cyber libertarians", who are very concerned and very vocal, and rightfully so:
the decisions that we make now regarding censorship, free speech, and how that whole
Internet technology of ours is going to affect us very intimately in the future.
The other two issues have to do with being able to continue to wire-tap digital
telephone communications. In 1994 our Congress passed a bill called Communications Act for
Law Enforcement Assistence, requiring telephone companies by 1998 to be able to provide
traditional wire-tapping services to law enforcement agencies even in a digital
environment. There was a huge debate over who was going to pay and whether the telephone
companies actually have the capacity to do that. In there’s a Bill at Congress to
extend it to year 2000. But with that argument also goes the concern over the ethics of
wire tapping by law enforcement agencies and the potential for abuse.
The third issue is encryption, of course, and that debate is raging too. How can law
enforcement have access to encrypted information without unfringing an individual’s
rights and our ability to keep our communications private? The debate is highly complex,
there are a lot of people with different positions, and we really quite frankly don’t
see any resolution to that in the near future. We are all dealing from a legal system and
a democratic system with technology that is rapidly outpacing our ability to deal with the
ambiguous social issues.
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