Speaking with investors this month at an Oracle financial analysts meeting, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that he expects AI to one day power massive law enforcement surveillance networks.
“We’re going to have supervision,” he said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Ellison might believe that continuous surveillance, driven by AI, could greatly reduce crime. But the evidence doesn’t necessarily support his assertion.
As a piece in The Washington Post notes, police data in the U.S. is historically biased — most datasets of criminal activity overrepresent people of color and low-income neighborhoods. Feeding that data into an AI model could lead it to suggest more criminal activity is in those areas, creating racially and socioeconomically biased feedback loops.
In 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its crime prediction program after an audit showed it resulted in subjecting Black and Latino people to more surveillance.