Biometric AI Futures in Law Enforcement Report.

This new report presents research from the ‘Critically Exploring Biometric AI Futures’ project.

The project explored the use of new Biometric Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in law enforcement, the challenges of fostering trust around their deployment and maps out debates on the main social, ethical, and legal concerns. It utilises novel design fiction methods to reflect on these issues with key stakeholders.

This short project was led by Dr Lachlan Urquhart at the University of Edinburgh with co-lead Dr Diana Miranda at the University of Stirling, and a research team of Dr Irena Connon (University of Stirling) and Dr Alex Laffer (now University of Winchester). The report provides key elements:

• A Rapid Systematic Review of existing scholarly and policy-relevant literature focusing on emerging biometric AI technologies in Law Enforcement. This includes the social, ethical, and legal issues that have been associated with these technologies.

• The creation of 3 Design Fictions to explore emergent uses of Biometric AI in Law Enforcement. These broadly consider police uses of Live Automated Facial Recognition; Emotion Recognition; and DNA Phenotyping.

• Discussion of findings from a High-Level Expert Roundtable run with Expert Stakeholders.

The report is available here.

Thanks to support from the EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance and Regulation Node and the ESRC Emotional AI in Smart Cities projects.