Police pushing technology to help solve crimes

Jul 18, 2024 News

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Kaieteur News – The Guyana Police Force (GPF) in its efforts to maintain transparency and accountability with the public has implemented technological innovations and advanced techniques within law enforcement to improve efficiency, accuracy and safety in combating crime.

This was highlighted on Wednesday when the Police Force hosted its 185^th Anniversary Symposium at the Police Officers’ Mess Annexe, Eve Leary, Georgetown. The symposium was held under the theme, ‘Modernizing policing by balancing technology, community engagement and global best practices.’ During the symposium, a panel discussion was conducted with the topic, ‘Law enforcement innovations, technology, techniques, digital age policing, cyber security and countering crime.’ The panel discussions included, Crime Chief, Wendell Blanhum, Officer commanding of the Signal Corps, Commander Roger Nurse, NDMA’S Deputy General Manager with responsibility for Operations, Orson Smith, Senior Superintendent Jermaine Johnson and National ICT advisor Darryl Akeung.

In his open remarks during the discussion, Blanhum underscored the serious threat cybercrime and cyber security pose to society. As such, he urged law enforcement officers to adapt to the technological era. He assured, “…We’ve established Zara Computer Centers in almost all (of) the regions, and we have our police ranks, who are being exposed to the various aspects of cybercrime and cyber security learning, so that they can be proficient.”

Moreover, Smith who is a part of the Civilian arm which works along with the GPF, explained that technological innovations and advanced techniques have significantly impacted law enforcement in improving efficiency, accuracy and safety.

“…One of the things I want to say is that I’m sure we all agree that the integration of advance technologies and all these innovative techniques are definitely going to transform our law enforcement and we must leverage these technologies, we must leverage things like data analytics, crime prediction models and all the other advances that they have to ensure that we are more effective, we are more efficient and we are more responsive,” Smith highlighted.

He stated some of the technological innovations that can be utilised within law enforcement are; facial recognition technology, licence plate recognition (LPR), Mobile Data terminals, Body-Worn Cameras (BWCs), Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Taking this into account, the benefits of these technological innovations would include an increase of efficiency, enhanced accuracy, better resource allocations and improved officer safety.  In light of this, Smith explained, “We can, because we are now involved in the use of technology, we can now be able to leverage historical crime data, we can also have complex algorithms do some computations for us and identify things like high crime areas, it can help us to allocate resources proactively.”  He continued, “The whole idea of automating these routine task and data analysis will help our officers to focus on other critical aspects of their work.”

Nevertheless, some challenges that can be considered by utilizing technological innovation would include privacy concerns, bias and fairness, public trust and data security, training and adaptation. Smith further explained that with technology, persons are always concerned about the data being misused. He said, “…so obviously we have to balance the use of data analytics with protecting the privacy of the individual and that’s the reason why you would have seen several different pieces of legislations being passed to protect citizens right to privacy.”

In the realms of the facial recognition, Smith highlighted that due to this technology not being fined-tuned for the countries’ demographics, errors would occur in identifying the person. He reasoned that in the case of identifying a person, a human can recognize if there is no resemblance, however facial recognition can sometimes state otherwise. “So we have to deal with those biases, so we have to be very careful that there is some biases and then you can end up unfairly targeting particular persons or even communities.”

Moreover, Smith pointed out the importance for training and adaptation. He underscored, “All of these things that we do, we have to make sure that our officers are properly trained, there is no point having the best facial recognition technology, licence plate recognition technology and we cannot use that technology to trap where that suspect went, which vehicle he escaped with and who was his known associates, and of course, we have to be willing to adapt.” As such, ongoing training and adaptation are essential to fully harness the potential of these innovations for effective and equitable policing.

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• Guyana Police Force, Orson Smith, symposium, technology innovation, Wendell Blanhum

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