Abu Dhabi Police go back to the future in bid to prevent crime

Speakers at a forum on the future of policing warned that authorities had to be on top of new technologies to get ahead of tech-minded criminals, and that futures studies had a part to play.

Marc Goodman, founder of the Future Crimes Institute, says that ‘unless we understand our enemies and what criminals are doing, we cannot be prepared ourselves’. Ravindranath K / The National

DUBAI // As technology develops, so do the people that use it to commit new and advanced crimes, an Abu Dhabi Police forum heard on Tuesday.

Speakers at the forum on the future of policing warned that authorities had to be on top of new technology to get ahead of tech-minded criminals.

Col Salah Al Ghoul, of the Interior Ministry, said the forum was the first of its kind in the UAE to attempt to integrate future foresight into the strategic plans of the ministry and all its departments.

“Bill Gates said a few days ago that he believes computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it has ever before, something that, although good, can pose a challenge to security apparatuses,” he said.

“As technology advances, the UAE wants to make sure it is ahead of the times and can foresee the future for possible crimes.”

Marc Goodman, founder of the Future Crimes Institute, told of how criminals are innovating using futures studies to keep a step ahead of authorities. Futures studies is the study of possible, probable and preferable futures that aims to determine the likelihood of future events.

“Unless we understand our enemies and what criminals are doing, we cannot be prepared ourselves,” he said. “Today’s cyber crime is just the beginning of the technological changes that criminals will be pursuing.”

Organised criminal groups have been committing computer-based crimes for the past two or three decades, and they are already moving ahead.

“Criminals can use technology just as competently as Microsoft and Google can,” Mr Goodman said.

He said the big challenge for police was that artificial intelligence was being used to help criminals. “Crimes used to be committed by human beings but now software can commit crime, such as denial of service attacks or identity theft,” he said. “Now one person does not just rob one person, one person can rob 100 million people. Never before has this been possible, so we must be prepared.”

The rise of robotics may also pose a challenge to authorities, Mr Goodman said.

“In the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Uruguay, we’ve seem criminals use drones in a fascinating manner,” he said. “A woman in Seattle, who lived on the 26th storey of her apartment, had her windows open and was not wearing much clothes, and a drone flew by her window and started to film her. Now drones can do espionage.”

He said drones could be used to deliver drugs, as in the case of a UK prison where a guard saw a drone carrying narcotics over the fence. Mr Goodman said it was important that police prepared for upcoming security threats and cooperated with other government departments and the public.

“In the UAE, there is a tremendous amount of technological expertise, and you need to get them involved,” he said.

Professor Paul Saffo, futurist and former director of the Institute for Future, said it was a good idea to engage the public at large. “This is a moment in time where you are beginning on a process to expand foresight around the police activities and emergency response. But at the end of the day, this is about more than just strategic allocation of police resources,” he said. “This is about turning ordinary citizens into essential front-line sensors and responders who also are thinking long term.”

Amy Zalman, the chief executive of World Future Society, said that foresight was a set of activities designed to improve the quality of decision-making.

“All decisions are, of course, decisions about the future because they propose actions to be taken, not those that have already passed,” she said.

“The question is: are they good decisions. One reason people started thinking of the future was fear but, equally, there was a great opportunity in the air.”