[Answered] Technology can make policing better and also more dangerous. Examine the statement.

Police technology refers to the wide range of scientific and technological methods, techniques, and equipment used in policing to prevent crime and apprehend criminals. UN mandate says minimum 220 policemen per 1 lakh people but India has only 130. Understaffed Indian police can be compensated by using technology like Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) and Cyberdome initiative of Kerala.

Positive aspects of technology in policing:

• Citizen-friendly: By providing digital access to the police, citizens can avail services from their home. The digital portals also provide an easy mechanism to register their complaints and track their complaint status.
• Faster crime detection and prevention: Due to increased use of artificial intelligence, surveillance cameras, and fingerprint systems it provides a digital footprint of the criminal. By using mobile forensics to retrieve critical information like contacts, location information, and social networking essages, it can reduce the longer waiting period.
• Transparent and efficient: The technical interventions like citizens feedback, social media, reduced time in filing chargesheet etc. bring efficiency in the functioning of police.
• Economical: With increasing salary burden for the Government, state-of-the art technologies can provide the solution in better policing.

How it can be dangerous?

• The predictive policing practices like integrating “fingerprint-based criminal record data fetching system” will give birth to mass surveillance, particularly of certain marginalised communities based on little evidence.
• It empowers the state to share data between different pillars of the criminal justice system in the name of creating efficient police infrastructure which ignores Right to privacy concerns and structural faults of policing.
• It makes a person continue to be an object of policing even after being acquitted by the courts. E.g. in Bhopal and Indore, Vimukta and Adivasi communities are being summoned by the police to get their records updated with copies of their Aadhaar cards and photographs as part of “Operation clean”.
• It increases the discretionary powers of the police on mere suspicion and the person with resources may never be convicted of a crime.

Way Forward:

Considerable increase in usage of technological support for policing is the need of the hour in the wake of increasing challenges and shortage of manpower in the police but it should not obstruct the fundamental rights of individuals. The Supreme Court also declared in K.S Puttaswamy case that fundamental right to informational privacy is paramount so State surveillance for policing needs to be re-evaluated in this light, given that policing replicates existing casteist notions of who criminals are, and how they are to be controlled.