Book Title: Computational Criminology: AI Applications in Forensic Science and Criminal Justice
Editors: Dr. Xavier Louis, Dr. Surbhi Girdhar, Ms. Aswathi Chandran Nair, Mr. Ravi Kumar, and Ms. Nandini Katare
Chapter: 2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/704/2
Author: Dr. K. Niranjana
Abstract
The history of technology in law enforcement is a history of promises of objectivity, precision, and scientific authority made to legislatures, courts, and publics by successive generations of reformers, inventors, and police administrators. It is also, inevitably, a history of unintended consequences, of tools deployed in contexts their designers could not have foreseen, and of the persistent entanglement of technical systems with the social inequalities they were ostensibly designed to overcome[1]. This chapter traces the long arc of that history from the moral cartographers of early nineteenth-century France, who first visualized the geography of crime and social suffering on hand-drawn maps, to the deep learning systems of the contemporary era that parse millions of hours of surveillance footage in search of suspicious behaviour.[2] In doing so, it pursues two interlocking arguments. The first is that each successive wave of technological innovation in law enforcement has reorganized not merely the administrative practices of policing but the very epistemological categories through which crime and criminality are understood. The second is that the trajectory of this history is neither linear nor necessarily progressive: problems of bias, accountability, and the misuse of technical authority that emerge in the machine learning era are recognizable in transformed and amplified form in the earlier history of the field. The choices that police organisations, legislators, and courts make today about which AI systems to adopt, how to govern them, and what safeguards to require are inflected by path dependencies institutional habits, professional cultures, and technological infrastructures inherited from this long history. A field that does not understand where it has come from will struggle to navigate where it is going.[3]
[1]Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Griffin, Bohn, 1861) vol 4, 1.
[2]AdolpheQuetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties (W & R Chambers, 1842) 82 (originally published 1835 as Sur l’homme).
[3]Andre-Michel Guerry, Essaisur la statistique morale de la France (Crochard, 1833) 14.