Police algorithms need national guidance ‘as a matter of urgency’

Police forces, regulators and software developers

According to the report, which 27 people from police forces, civil society organisations, government departments, academics and legal experts were interviewed for, the “research participants universally recognised a lack of any official national guidelines for police”.

It added that establishing these new guidelines would require a joint approach between various regulators and policing bodies, including the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the Home Office and the College of Policing.

These new guidelines should include the “integrated impact assessment” as a core requirement, the report said.

To ensure a coordinated development and deployment of any new data-driven technologies, the NPCC and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) should also establish a national coordinating group for data analytics, which “should maintain a high-level catalogue of all algorithms used by police forces nationwide to inform operational decision-making”.

For software developers, usually providing “commercial off-the-shelf” products to police, the report recommends making it fully auditable, adding that “intellectual property rights must not be a restriction on this scrutiny”.

It also said that human-interpretable features were essential to gaining transparency over how the algorithm came to its decision.

Regulation and ethical oversight

Rather than establishing prescriptive rules and standards for specific data technologies, Rusi recommends any future framework is “tech-agnostic” and “principles based”.

“The framework should instead establish standardised processes to ensure that data analytics projects follow recommended routes for empirical evaluation of algorithms in their operational context and evaluate the project against legal requirements and ethical standards,” said the report.

From its interviews, Rusi found the development of police algorithms are not underpinned by a robust empirical evidence base to support the purported benefits of data-driven technologies, concluding that “a clear business case is therefore often absent”.

At the moment, police have adopted more of an “exploratory approach”, whereby analysis is carried out without establishing a clear purpose until after insights have already been generated.

On top of this, the report found “widespread recognition of the need for meaningful and independent ‘ethical oversight’ of police data analytics projects”.

It added, however, that there was no consensus on how to properly apply ethical oversight. “In particular, it remains unclear whether this oversight should be delivered at the local force level, or in the form of a centralised national structure,” it said.

“While various groups currently provide ethical oversight to policing, there remains a lack of consistency in approach between forces, and unclear delineation of local, regional and national responsibilities.”

To address this, the report said the UK Police Ethics Guidance Group should conduct a comprehensive review of current police ethics committees to discover whether they would be effective mechanisms for oversight.

This would include looking at whether or not the committees could be “upskilled”, or whether bespoke digital committees could be established in parallel.

The report was written by Alexander Babuta, a research fellow in national security studies at Rusi, and Marion Oswald, the vice-chancellor’s senior fellow in law at the University of Northumbria.