The Silicon chip meets the SHO

 

Let’s see what will happen if a citizen meets an AI-enabled robot instead of a human being (Duty Officer) when he first appears at the police station. At the very least, he’ll get a patient hearing, almost immediately, no sitting around waiting indefinitely, no lunch-ke-baad-aana. Whatever he says will get recorded in the General Diary verbatim but in a legible manner. If the matter is merely informatory in nature, a receipt with General Diary number, date and time will be automatically generated for him. If the matter indicates a cognizable offence, an FIR will be drawn up in a legible manner with correct sections of law without any discretion and escalated to the SHO for taking a decision as to whether to investigate or refuse investigation and allotment to an Investigating Officer. Refusal to register complaints, the long-standing bane of the police, will now be a thing of the past. This one measure, in itself, will transform the functioning and image of police no end.

Further, AI can reduce the humungous documentation burden that police stations grapple with. In 2024, around 59 lakh cognizable cases were registered. Each such case involves a First Information Report, the spot maps, witness statements, arrest memos, forensic reports, seizure lists, medical examination records, report in final form, and so on – documents numbering in hundreds. All documents in local language need to be translated in English when a case goes to the High Court or the Supreme Court. Manual translations for a single case can take up to 15 days which can now be done in an hour or so, while retaining specialised legal/ local terminology like surathal, panchnama, khatian, zimma etc. and also retaining page-for-page parity so that it is acceptable in the court. AI enabled digitisation can read handwritten FIRs in multiple languages with high accuracy. It can also process low-quality scans and faded documents by intelligently reconstructing the degraded letters. Most importantly, all the documents will become searchable.

Another big help from AI would be when the investigation is transferred to another officer due to transfer, etc.. Rather than the new officer having to go through the entire case file word by word, he can go through a structured summary, a chronological timeline of events, evidentiary gaps and inconsistencies, all generated by AI. AI can listen in to interrogation of accused, correlate everything and point out the inconsistencies in the statements.

AI can also generate the chargesheet index, cross-reference evidences and biometric data, witnesses and the sections of law and check for completeness of the case diary and the chargesheet. It can also create a draft prosecution narrative to be used by the Public Prosecutor and the Investigating Officer. My back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that AI can free up to around 30 officer-hours per day at a mid-size police station on documentation alone.

Both at the police station level and beyond, AI can also help in mapping crime hotspots, connect FIRs and Modus Operandi and help in identifying repeat offenders.

Police station inspections by senior officers are the backbone of police administration. Usually, it’s an annual affair preceding which there is a lot of activity to compile statistics and cover-ups so that the inspection goes off peacefully. Then things are forgotten for a year until the next inspection which may be by a different officer or the same officer who may not remember much of what all he’d instructed the previous time around. When one goes through successive inspection remarks, one sometimes sees the same instructions having been passed from time immemorial, without any substantive changes in the performance. AI can enable a GPS-enabled field visit tracking system which will have a digital record of every inspection. This will enable continuous performance monitoring and accountability rather than having a lot of sound and fury once in a year, signifying nothing. During every inspection, all previous instructions and their compliances would be available to the inspecting officer so that repeat issues will be highlighted. GPS tracking will ensure that the supervising officer actually visits the police station rather than churning out reports sitting in his office.

A module can be carved out for the public representatives to send their recommendation and escalate to higher-ups, if need be. Further, there can be a chat bot for the public to obtain any information regarding their application for permission, licences, various fines, applicable sections of law, etc. in any Indian language and English.

Finally, the performance of officers will now face automatic and systematic evaluation based on objective parameters like average response time, detection, preventive action, tasks performed, compliance metrics, pending cases, escalation frequency, etc. so that high performers can be rewarded and encouraged suitably while underperformers will be caught out and earmarked for skill and performance augmentation.

Despite all the foregoing, it is important that there must be human oversight and intervention because AI makes mistakes and sometimes, the mistakes in policing can make the difference between life and death, literally. Even if the Duty Officer may become dispensable, there must be some supervision of the robot doing that job too. Because many things about policing are confidential, the AI systems must be based on a dedicated self-hosted Large Language model, end-to-end encrypted and with restricted access to certain parts and trained on all the criminal laws, police regulations, Government Orders, SOPs and circulars.

There should be a unified gateway for all officers. Any FIR should be possible to be generated at any police station with automatic transfers to the police station of jurisdiction. The heinous crime cases (SR cases) which are supervised by senior officers can have almost instantaneous passing of instructions with deadlines and automatic escalation in case of non-compliance.

While predictive AI hasn’t been much of a success, it can still be used for “now-casting” – i.e., predicting the present or very near future crimes, riots and traffic issues using real-time data. AI can’t judge context or the nuances of social situations and does not have the emotional intelligence required of an SHO. As of today, AI can’t become an SHO but use of AI can make for an unimaginably better SHO. By several orders of magnitude.