Description
Several UK government policy documents published over the past few years attempt to lay out a vision for and estimate of the challenges that policing institutions are likely to face over the coming decades. While generally less in focus of public debate than the Strategic Defense Review, National Security Strategy and Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy, these documents appear to follow in the tradition of recent years to militarise policing or at least adopt similar approaches and language of the military domain. This paper seeks to shed more light onto the ways in which future-of-policing discourses borrow from those in the military domain. By scrutinising the use of concepts and language in framing future operating environments, this research will examine how, if at all, threat framings in the policing and military domain converge or diverge and, in turn, are used to frame discussions over the adoption of AI technologies in policing. By doing so, this paper seeks to understand how the “unknown” (e.g., lone actors, cyber-enabled attacks) is constructed in police and military imaginations of the future, and whether or how these constructions justify the adoption pre-emptive AI-based technologies? Ultimately, this will help to understand if and how the adoption of AI policing tools reinforces, or perhaps challenges, current processes of police militarisation. The findings of this paper will make an important contribution to scholarship on police militarisation by directing scholarly attention from contemporary convergence of knowledge and practice to discussions about the future.
