APPLIED FUTURISM
Future Policing
Futurist Nicklas Larsen explores the practical application of futures studies together with pioneers in the field.
Q&A with Odette Meli, Director at the Strategic Insights Centre of the Australian Federal Police
Odette Meli is Director at the Strategic Insights Centre of the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Her experience spans across policy areas and crime operations like terrorism, online crime, and child sex exploitation. We met with her to discuss the changing landscape of policing, the evolution of the social contract, the impact of emerging technologies on crime, and the challenges of doing police work in a globalised, digitised, and borderless future.
What changing dynamics do you see impacting policing and civil service more broadly in the future?
This very question was the focus of an Independent Review of the Australian Public Service published last year, which singled out four megatrends that will shape our future operating environment: 1) Changing public expectations of government . 2) Sweeping and rapid advances in technology. 3) Societal and geopolitical shifts, such as increasing global instability, the rise of the global tech giants, and growing inequality, and 4) Changing nature of work.
If you compare the above to the current state of play in policing, we are still buried and bound in a bureaucratic construct, which sometimes is an impediment for us, particularly if we are trying to work in the futures space. We very much need a bureaucracy that is comfortable with ambiguity, allowing ourselves to reflect and to continue to challenge biases in our assumptions. With globalisation, economic activity has moved well beyond the confines of single jurisdictions, and value is shifting from physical to digital. The technologies that made globalisation possible have allowed non- state actors, from ordinary citizens and small businesses to criminals and terrorists, to operate globally. They have provided criminals with much bigger pools of victims, allowing them to collaborate anonymously online and to operate from foreign safe havens. Despite the emerging resistance to globalisation in many parts of the developed and developing world, the technologies that made globalisation possible cannot be uninvented, and powerful new ones are appearing.
In Australia’s immediate neighbourhood, political and environmental stresses — including signs that some state actors and crime groups are aligning their strategies — will reinforce demands for policing development and humanitarian assistance in the Indo-Pacific region. All these developments are shaping the policing environment for AFP in challenging new ways. To define our mission properly, we must continually seek to understand the environment in which criminals and police will be operating over the next five to ten years.
The AFP works with the concept ‘Social Contract 2.0’. Can you explain what this means?
Broadly understood, a social contract is an agreement between citizens and their society where the former gives up some freedoms in exchange for peace and security from the latter. Since the notion of security is changing, so is the contract. A core challenge for police forces will be to maintain trust and legitimacy with the public and political leaders in a more difficult and complex operating environment. Police in Australia have maintained a strong level of trust to date, but there is no guarantee this will continue into the near future. Achieving future trust, which we have labelled ‘Social Contract 2.0’, will require continual effort and a focus on demonstrating competence, trustworthiness, and continual engagement. Current practice requires updating if the AFP is to stick to the Peelian Principle that an ethical police force is based on the power of police coming from the common consent of the public, as opposed to being the power of the state. In the future, the role and value of police will be less settled and more contested than it has ever been. The experience of some police forces in the US, where large sections of the community actively see them as dangerous and even enemies, could be the AFP’s future if we don’t work with the Australian public.
What needs to be done to avoid an adversarial relationship between police and the public?
A focus on ethics, respect for privacy, more open communication, and transparency will be very important. Advanced digital technology and media have changed people’s expectations and trust thresholds. Information has become easy to share, so the expectations of sharing information have grown higher. Trust nowadays is placed less in official authorities and more in those who communicate clearly and come across as credible. For civil servants, this will require ongoing cultural change as it runs against traditional police culture and training. One significant, necessary organisational change is to deliver trust and legitimacy more proactively in broader policy and public considerations — without overstepping the police’s role within the government system.
What emerging technologies will change the nature of policing in the future?
We see that five fast-paced ‘future technology’ trends — digitisation, connection, automation, augmentation, and material manipulation — are emerging with the potential to disrupt international society, crime, and policing. Digital manufacturing, nanotechnology, gene editing, and synthetic biology are enabling us to digi- tise, manipulate, and reproduce nearly every aspect of the material and biological environment. However, as the technologies of material manipulation mature, they will enable new and more effectual types of crime. Advanced 3D manufacturing will enable criminal syndicates to manufacture products and bypass established regulatory frameworks. This potentially has significant implications for the protection of intellectual property and taxation. The convergence of technologies and the blurring of traditional categories of crimes provide tremendous opportunities for those with flexibility and access to the skills necessary to take advantage. Digital startups and big tech companies are likely to prosper, but so are criminals, particularly well-resourced crime syndicates. With a more fluid global environment, it is easier to see the opportunities criminals have to grow, increase profits, and capitalise on the converging technological and social environment.
Can you give us an example?
Something that we were entertaining was the NASA investigation around what could be considered the first crime perpetrated in space after one of the agency’s astronauts was accused of illegally accessing her wife’s bank account during her stay on the International Space Station. It poses the question of whose jurisdiction do you go to when something like that happens.
What advantages are criminals likely to have in the future?
Criminals in 2030 will likely have an operating environment in which their greater flexibility gives significant speed in scaling up and down different activities, such as the ability to scale new ventures rapidly —
mirroring the rapid scaling of digital companies that we see today. They will likely have greater ability and expertise in influencing public and societal thinking and debate, disrupting existing international networks and creating new ones with a superior economic infrastructure surpassing the gross domestic product of low to middle-income countries, and we might see less clear distinctions between governments, businesses, and organised crime. None of these expected advantages are new, but the environment in 2030 is likely to make these opportunities much more accessible than they are today. Moreover, the contrast between the flexibility of criminal enterprises — which are not subject to legal and ethical oversight, do not have to maintain public support, nor are they bound by rigid bureaucratic cultures — and those of many police forces, are likely to grow. In the absence of aggressive reform, criminal enterprises will have even greater advantages over policing.
What does that mean for the competencies needed in the future?
For instance, it is expected that private industry will be an essential partner in the exchange of data and expertise and creating economies of scale. It seems likely that no investigation would commence without such partners at the investigative table. This is often referred to as a ‘hybrid’ model of policing; but, doing this effectively requires specialised and niche skills that the typical police officer in 2020 may not have. We cannot rely on individual teams to set up partnerships and models for making them effective. Significant work is required to set up agreements, governance, trust, and precedent for effective partnerships to be possible.
How do you hope to see the impact of the work that you are doing?
I would like to see my work at the AFP Strategic Insights Centre as a legacy piece. We are extremely practical in our approach and we need to understand how, what, and why things are going to make a difference for change and continuous improvement. So, I think for me, my impact is to add a tactical and practical solution to futures thinking. I would like the Insights Centre to be a broker of future possibilities. I have had the pleasure of meeting a futurist named Dr John Sweeney. He inspired me because of his work with Interpol, and I remember him saying something along the lines of: ‘working with and creating roadmaps for the future is like creating windows where there are walls’, and I think the nerve in that is knowing where to put the windows, how big they should be, and understanding that ending, so that your solution that you’re posting is practically making a difference. That is the key to me.
Some advice to your future self?
I started my career thinking I could change the world without fanning a fire too wildly, but I think that is a wonderfully healthy naivety, particularly from a youth perspective: this feeling that you can take part in and push for change. This naivety has now evolved into understanding that you can make a difference through being empowered. This is probably a more sophisticated notion of naivety because I can see that I have been formed by more informed and broader understanding that came with more experience. However, that is not to say that youth today do not have a greater understanding of what’s going on. Many examples are playing out right now, particularly in the realm of climate change where we have a 16-year-old starting a global movement, making us extremely aware, particularly in political circles, of the impacts of climate change on her generation. Hence, the advice I would like to give my future self, based on what I know now, would be to not try and convince everybody of your view if they are not entertaining it. You often meet individuals that are comfortable with what they know, and they are somewhat difficult to move. So, being mindful that sometimes people will understand and engage with the future, but to some, it is very difficult. So, when you know that it is futile, sometimes it is okay to walk away. I am not suggesting that you give up and go home; it is an analogy of picking the right battles so that you spend your limited energy wisely. I think I probably tried to solve too many problems when I was younger and tried to convince everybody of that, and I don’t think you need to; you just have to pick the right individuals to influence who can make the change for the greater good.
