8 AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: JUNE 2017 T here’s a basic promise that comes with automa- tion that CEOs, mayors and governors just can’t resist. The promise is this – you can fire a lot of people and eliminate a lot of positions. The future of law enforcement, from a business perspective, is bright indeed. Just check the earnings of companies that make stuff like LPRs, facial recognition software and driver-less vehicles. But from a labor perspective, the future is exceedingly bleak. To really get a sense of what the in- tersection of automation, technology and policing looks like, you might want to cast your gaze across the pond towards the United Kingdom. According to the BBC, drones equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities will be the answer to ever more budget cuts and law enforce- ment jobs lost. Gwent Police’s Chief Constable Jeff Farrar said he foresees every police vehicle carrying a drone in just a few years. He also says we can get rid of a lot of police positions by letting comput- ers handle the parts of the job “that If you invested in any of the technologies that will inevitably replace most police officers, congratulations! Odds are you’re gong to be very wealthy in the future. The future is... now Between automation and “civilianization” we could be looking at a lot less police officers on the job in the very near future. The good news is that the remaining human cops might get cool crap like landspeeders made to look like old Buicks. Wrap a virtual fence around your community to proactively prevent crime and improve safety. Add investigative power and enhance safety with fixed license plate recognition cameras without increasing manpower. Strategically positioned cameras at entries and exits create the virtual fence. • Receive alerts when vehicles of interest enter your community • Identify rolling stolens • Get more information for criminal investigations 2017 Vigilantsolutions.com License Plate Recognition. Analytics. Facial Recognition. do not involve emotion.” Gwent, which is in Wales, has seen £50m of funding cuts in recent years with more to come and is down 300 officers since 2011. Mr. Farrar said there’s no way to afford the number of cops that they used to have and that police needed to embrace technology in order to survive. “The reality is a lot of the job we do, if it doesn’t contain emotion, then we can probably do it by way of a computer. “So a lot of the things that we may be able to do in the future through artificial intelligence might be things that ordinarily would have been done by people.” “I actually think in years to come, and it’s not that far off, we will have one of those drones in the back of every police vehicle so we will be able to deploy those all the time.” If that sounds like cops playing chauffeur/babysitter while the robots do the police work, not to worry. They plan on keeping some human law enforcement officers around for appearance’s sake. “The public still likes to see a po- lice officer as it’s reassuring,” Farrar said.