The Silicon-chip SHO

 

Today Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. It’s in the smart-alec student’s assignment paper; it’s in the Income Tax officer’s financial forensics to catch tax dodgers; it’s in the dystopian scenario of the doomsday soothsayers; it’s in the ongoing attempts at self-driving cars; most importantly, it’s in the adda-intellectual’s morning discourse – he calls it Chai GPT (Genuinely Pure Tea) enhanced with AI (Adrak and Ilaichi). Has the time come then for AI to replace the SHO (Station House Officer), the pivot around which the entire policing system in India revolves?

Let’s see what all the SHO is expected to do.

The SHO supervises all the work of the police station including work allocation, general management, discipline and all the administrative work. In turn, he is the most supervised officer in the Police or in any governmental set-up, with at least six layers fairly closely supervising his work. This includes the senior officers and the judiciary to whom all his crime-related work is accountable.

Under the Indian criminal jurisprudence, he is the de jure Investigating Officer of all crimes in his Police Station area. All the investigation is carried out by officers of the Police Station under powers delegated by him. A senior officer takes up investigation under powers of the SHO assumed by the former.

The SHO is also responsible for maintaining public order in his jurisdiction. He arranges both preventive and mitigation actions in this regard. Preventive actions include patrolling, keeping an eye on evolving situations, surveillance of known offenders, lookout for suspicious or unknown faces, predicting disturbances and so on. When a major disturbance occurs, the SHO is usually the first one on the firing line and has to meet fire with force.

The SHO is expected to deal with situations and persons with empathy and emotional intelligence. He is called upon to treat people with a rare nuance which distinguishes between a crime of malice from the same crime born out of desperation or mortal distress. He navigates with resourcefulness (mostly illegal) demands from political parties of various hues, ever alert to the fact that today’s no-hoper opposition may be tomorrow’s king.

The general citizenry has huge expectations from the SHO. Frankly speaking, there is not a single other agency of the government which is open and responsive to the public 24 x 7 x 365, come hell or high water. When everything else is shut in the odd hours or during major depredations, there’s at least a sentry and mostly an officer available at the police station – in that sense, it is always the governmental arm of the last resort. 

Apart from all this, there’s a huge social role thrust upon the SHO. All government offices have a person who is called Bada Babu or its equivalent in various languages. In the housing department office, for example, the Section Officer is called Bada Babu. However, to the general public, Bada Babu usually means the SHO. So, amongst the Bada Babus, the SHO has an outsized eminence, he is primus inter pares. This is because of the influence he and his work wield, touching everyone at a very basic level.

Given such a complex job description, can he be substituted by AI? Let’s look at what AI can or cannot do, as of now.

The term AI is being used as THE ONE BIG THING which is turning everything topsy-turvy now. Well, it has been disruptive but it’s not one single thing. It’s an umbrella term comprising at least three categories: Generative AI, Predictive AI and Content moderation AI.

Generative AI has had the maximum success and has caught the popular imagination and also filled people with a lot of apprehension. However, what it actually does is basically recognise patterns in data, words and pictures and correlate them through layer-by-layer iterations so well that its output comes across almost as human. All that it’s doing, based on its training, is choosing the most appropriate words, picture patterns, etc. to give the most suitable response as per its algorithms. Since it has been trained on a very large amount of data and has had some moderation built in, its responses have been very impressive but not always accurate. It doesn’t have sentience, i.e., consciousness, regardless of the hype and the claims. However, its speed and abilities have been formidable.

As far as the predictive part is concerned, AI hasn’t worked well so far. In Police-related work, it has been tried out for criminal risk prediction (i.e., whether to release an accused on bail with low risk of his committing crimes again), hiring (whether the person will do well on the job), face recognition and crime prediction, with indifferent results and racial/ gender/ economic biases. So far, it has been somewhat satisfactory only in “predicting the past,” which is of no use to anyone.

Content moderation has been used extensively by social media platforms but has shown large and grave mistakes. So much so that one can’t even search for “gorillas” in Google photos or Apple photos apps now – blocked by the apps themselves because it identified all black people as gorillas.

At the present stage of development when AI is more of “Microsoft Excel than The Terminator,” it is not feasible to replace the SHO with a robot. Things might change when AI becomes capable of judging the context, cultural and political nuances and is able to do AI research itself, i.e., progress to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). That would require AI agents to self-improve through interacting with the physical world and the social world. To my mind, that is still some distance away.

That said, there’re still tremendous benefits to be had if we adopt AI for a lot of automation in policing, specifically at the police station level. I think, the utility through automation and not the hype of a sentient SHO-replacing-AI, is the part worth sitting with. That calls for another blog. Next week.