Transparency, accountability, and trust emerged as crucial factors for law enforcement's AI-enabled future during the INTERPOL-UNICRI Global Meeting on Artificial Intelligence for Law Enforcement (23-27 November 2020). Now in its third year, the annual global meeting was held virtually with more than 600 registered participants from over 80 countries. This year’s event tackled issues such as lessons learned in deploying AI effectively and the potential misuse of the technology. There was also a call for a more data-driven and scientific means of criminal investigation, as well as for more interdisciplinary partnerships, in particular with academia. Disruption of AI-controlled systems, AI-authored fake news, and the use of driverless systems as weapons were also identified as the most probable AI-enabled future crimes. All these observations and more will be taken into account by INTERPOL and UNICRI in the development of a “Responsible AI Innovation Toolkit for Law Enforcement”.
Representatives from law enforcement, as well as related fields in academia, industry, and the broader international community heard from 50 speakers on diverse topics. Speakers from the Biometrics Institute, the World Economic Forum, United Nations entities and private sector companies shared their experiences, highlighting the clear need for collaboration, inclusion of interest groups, and diversity to develop widely accepted and usable frameworks. These findings were echoed by poll results conducted with all participants throughout the duration of the week-long event.
Taking into consideration all the aggregated feedback, a group of experts and volunteers together with UNICRI’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in The Hague and the INTERPOL Innovation Centre in Singapore will build on the momentum and advance the development of the Toolkit. The shared goal of UNICRI, INTERPOL, law enforcement and AI experts, as well as the many volunteers is to answer current policing needs for practical insights, use cases, lessons learned, principles, recommendations and resources to support and guide law enforcement in the design, development and deployment of responsible AI.
