Don’t have to be too academic, just finish it on time, should have a title . Article in the document
the_future_of_getting_arrested.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Dispatches
Shifts: Technology
THE FUTURE OF
GETTING ARRESTED
What they’re gonna do when they come for you
E
BY LEON NEYFAKH
VEN THE MOST straightforward
arrest is built upon an incredibly
complex foundation: the moment
the handcufs go on is the moment
some of our society’s most hotly
contested ideas about justice, security, and liberty are brought to
bear on an individual. It’s also a moment
that’s poised to change dramatically, as
law- enforcement agencies around the
country adopt new technology—from
predictive-policing software to surveillance cameras programmed to detect
criminal activity—and incorporate
emerging research into the work of apprehending suspects.
Not all of the innovations that are
in the works will necessarily become
widely used, of course. Experts say that
many of them will ultimately require
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF
ARRESTS
1
J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 5
How They’ll Know a
Crime Is Taking Place
Devices designed to detect questionable activity are proliferating. Several
1862: The first
adjustable handcuffs are patented.
History
26
trade-ofs that the public may not be willing to make. “We’re approaching a world
where it’s becoming technologically possible to ensure 100 percent compliance
with a lot of laws,” says Jay Stanley, a
senior policy analyst at the American
Civil Liberties Union. “For example, we
could now pretty easily, if we wanted to,
enforce 100 percent compliance with
speed limits.” That doesn’t mean we will.
Here, drawn from interviews with a
range of thinkers and practitioners, is a
glimpse of how tomorrow’s police ofcers may go about identifying, pursuing,
and arresting their targets.
1888: A French
official pioneers the
modern mug shot.
1875
T H E AT L A N T IC
cities have recently put in place networks of microphone-based gunshot
sensors, and others are likely to adopt
similar systems. When a sensor picks up
a suspicious noise, a computer program
analyzes the sound and, if it resembles
gunf re, determines its point of origin
to within a few yards. A human reviews
the report and, if warranted, dispatches
ofcers to the scene—all within about 40
seconds of the gunshot. Meanwhile, a
Vancouver company is testing marijuana
breathalyzers that can approximate the
amount of THC in a person’s system;
Guohua Li, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, thinks they will probably
be in routine use within fve years. Police may also start making use of intelligent surveillance cameras equipped
with sensors that can identify abnormal
or suspicious behavior. According to
Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, such technology is being tested in several American cities
and is already sophisticated enough to
“notice” when someone leaves a bag
unattended, or when a car repeatedly
circles the same block.
At the federal level, an initiative called
Next Generation 911 will enable victims
and witnesses to send texts and, eventually, photos and videos to emergency
dispatchers—something that’s currently
impossible because the 911 network runs
on analog technology from the 1970s.
People caught in situations—home invasions, for instance, or domestic-violence
incidents—in which they can’t safely
speak into a phone will be able to get help,
and police will receive valuable real-time
crime-scene footage.
Controversially, police departments
are starting to monitor social media,
which many gangs have embraced as a
vehicle for branding and boasting. By
searching for specific keywords and
mapping interactions among individual
users, law-enforcement agencies can
keep track of suspected gang members,
and identify bubbling gang rivalries.
1924: Congress authorizes the FBI
to launch a national clearinghouse
and repository for fingerprints.
1900
1925
I L L U S T R AT I O N BY Á LVA R O D O M Í N G U E Z
They can also infiltrate networks by shooting occurred, and track the assailposting under aliases and “friending” ants’ movements.
suspects. The Yale criminologist AnWide-area surveillance is not coming
drew Papachristos, who works closely to your town tomorrow, however. For
with police departments and gangs, says starters, huge leaps in data-storage techhe hopes that the coming years will see nology must occur before police can feaa public debate about how aggressively sibly keep a 24/7 video record of an entire
law- enforcement agencies should use city, according to Palaniappan. What the
the Web to gather intelligence on people ACLU’s Jay Stanley calls “societal selfwho are not already criminal suspects. restraint” will likely play a role as well.
Many states have set legal thresholds for Last year, he pointed out, the city counclassifying someone as a gang member, cil in Dayton, Ohio, voted down the loPapachristos says. “But if all the evidence cal police department’s proposal to use
you need is a Twitter post that says, ‘I wide-area surveillance, because of prihate the Disciples,’ the bar is changing.” vacy concerns. “There’s a lag between
when people start to lose their privacy
and when they really start to feel it,”
How They’ll Find
2
Stanley said. “At a certain point, the frog
Their Suspects
Usually predictive policing refers to feed- might just say, ‘It’s getting too hot in
ing reams of city data into a computer here,’ and it’ll jump out.”
and dispatching extra ofcers to areas
that are deemed to be at high risk of
How They’ll Actually
3
future crime. There’s potential, though,
Arrest Someone
for predictive policing to be less passive. Confronting suspects and taking them
See, for instance, the approach taken in into custody should become safer for
Albuquerque, where, according to a re- police ofcers, thanks to so-called realport from the Police Executive Research time crime centers stafed by analysts
Forum, ofcers took the established (if who can transmit information to officontroversial) practice of leaving “bait” cers en route to a crime scene—the
for would-be thieves to the next level: criminal histories of the people who live
they planted iPads, cars, and spools of at that address, say, or foor-plan details,
copper wire in areas that were fagged or intelligence gathered from surveilby their predictive software, and then lance cameras.
arrested people who tried to steal them.
An even more profound change inDepartments that would rather not volves the personal information that
rely on probabilities might try the new- will be collected immediately following
fangled “send an airplane with cameras an arrest. Tablets equipped with facialinto the sky and have it record every sin- recognition software have already been
gle thing that happens below” technique. rolled out in San Diego; meanwhile, the
According to the Center for Investiga- FBI has launched a giant database of biotive Reporting, that’s more or less what metric information that includes images
police in Compton, California, have of people’s faces, irises, fngerprints, and
been doing. Kannappan Palaniappan, palms, as well as details about tattoos,
a computer-science professor at the scars, and other markings. Civil-liberties
University of Missouri, says this could groups worry that as police make use of
one day become a standard method for new identifcation tools during routine
monitoring high-crime urban neigh- stops—and in the process collect new
borhoods. With the use of wide-area kinds of biometric data, including DNA
surveillance, police would be able to and voice samples—the FBI’s database
“go to the tape” when, say, a drive-by will swell with intimate information
1956: philip k. dick’s story “the
minority report” imagines precrime, a crime-prevention system
powered by clairvoyant mutants.
1968: 911 becomes
the standard emergency number for
the united states.
1950
28
J a n u a ry/ f e b r u a ry 2 0 1 5
1975
t h e at l a n t ic
about people who are never convicted of
any crime.
Of course, technology can only do
so much to alter the way police ofcers
perform their jobs; the rest is up to them
and their superiors. On that count, happily, some experts predict significant
improvement in the way officers treat
suspects once they’ve arrested them.
For one thing, the process will become
more transparent, thanks to the spread
of body-mounted cameras that capture
ofcers’ interactions with the public.
According to the Boise State University psychology professor Charles Honts,
interrogations could also become less
coercive as agencies across the country decide to abandon their traditional
interrogation method, known as the Reid
Technique. Newer approaches discourage ofcers from lying to suspects about
evidence or attempting to manipulate
them through implicit threats and promises. Instead of, say, looking for signs of
deception in suspects’ nonverbal behavior, interviewers are encouraged to create
situations that give suspects an opportunity to contradict evidence investigators
have already confrmed.
Experimental research by Saul Kassin,
a psychologist at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, has shown that, compared with these newer methods, older
methods that rely on deceiving the suspect increase the risk that innocent people will confess. Honts hopes that with
time, police departments will respond
to the emerging evidence. “There’s no
uniform code about how things are supposed to be done by the police, so it’ll
take a while,” he told me. “But the force
of data is going to make it happen.”
Leon Neyfakh reports on ideas for The
Boston Globe.
introducing shifts: this is the first in a print
and online series on the elements of a changing
world, from technology and business to
politics and culture. For more information, visit
theatlantic.com/shifts.
2015
1998: taser international
begins marketing electroshock weapons to u.s. lawenforcement agencies.
2000
2050: police wear sensors that
monitor a suspect’s heart rate,
breathing, and blood pressure
for evidence of deception.
Predictions
2050
Jacksonscott/wikimedia commons; chuck Burton/ap
Dispatches
Copyright of Atlantic is the property of Atlantic Media Company and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.
…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
Recent Comments