It bills itself as the biggest gathering of police chiefs in america, where leaders from lots of the country’s 18,000 police departments and even some from abroad convene for product demos, discussions, parties, and awards.
I went along to see how artificial intelligence was being discussed, and the message to police chiefs seemed crystal clear: In case your department is slow to adopt AI, fix that now. The long run of policing will depend on it in all its forms.
Within the event’s expo hall, the vendors (of which there have been greater than 600) offered a glimpse into the ballooning industry of police-tech suppliers. Some had little to do with AI—booths showcased body armor, rifles, and prototypes of police-branded Cybertrucks, and others displayed recent sorts of gloves promising to guard officers from needles during searches. But one needed only to look to where the biggest crowds gathered to grasp that AI was the key draw.
The hype focused on three uses of AI in policing. The flashiest was virtual reality, exemplified by the booth from V-Armed, which sells VR systems for officer training. On the expo floor, V-Armed built an arena complete with VR goggles, cameras, and sensors, not unlike the one the corporate recently installed on the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Attendees could don goggles and undergo training exercises on responding to energetic shooter situations. Many competitors of V-Armed were also on the expo, selling systems they said were cheaper, simpler, or simpler to keep up.
The pitch on VR training is that in the long term, it will possibly be cheaper and more engaging to make use of than training with actors or in a classroom. “When you’re having fun with what you’re doing, you’re more focused and also you remember greater than when a PDF and nodding your head,” V-Armed CEO Ezra Kraus told me.
The effectiveness of VR training systems has yet to be fully studied, they usually can’t completely replicate the nuanced interactions police have in the actual world. AI will not be yet great on the soft skills required for interactions with the general public. At a special company’s booth, I attempted out a VR system focused on deescalation training, through which officers were tasked with calming down an AI character in distress. It suffered from lag and was generally quite awkward—the character’s answers felt overly scripted and programmatic.
The second focus was on the changing way police departments are collecting and interpreting data. Somewhat than buying a gunshot detection tool from one company and a license plate reader or drone from one other, police departments are increasingly using expanding suites of sensors, cameras, and so forth from a handful of leading firms that promise to integrate the information collected and make it useful.
Police chiefs attended classes on learn how to construct these systems, like one taught by Microsoft and the NYPD concerning the Domain Awareness System, an online of license plate readers, cameras, and other data sources used to trace and monitor crime in Latest York City. Crowds gathered at massive, high-tech booths from Axon and Flock, each sponsors of the conference. Flock sells a collection of cameras, license plate readers, and drones, offering AI to research the information coming in and trigger alerts. These styles of tools have are available for heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, which see them as an assault on privacy that does little to assist the general public.
