The big idea: should robots take over fighting crime?

Could artificial intelligence offer a fairer and more efficient way of policing?

San Francisco's board of supervisors recently voted to let their police deploy robots equipped with lethal explosives - before backtracking several weeks later. In America, the vote sparked a fierce debate on the militarisation of the police, but it raises fundamental questions for us all about the role of robots and AI in fighting crime, how policing decisions are made and, indeed, the very purpose of our criminal justice systems. In the UK, officers operate under the principle of policing by consent" rather than by force. But according to the 2020 Crime Survey for England and Wales, public confidence in the police has fallen from 62% in 2017 to 55%. One recent poll asked Londoners if the Met was institutionally sexist and racist. Nearly two thirds answered either probably" or definitely".

This is perhaps unsurprising, given the high-profile cases of crimes by police officers such as Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, who recently pleaded guilty to 49 offences including rape and sexual assault.