Your AI strategy needs to move as fast as the technology
AI is creating practical opportunities for policing. Transcription and translation can reduce administrative workload. Video analytics and entity recognition can help process large volumes of information. AI-assisted analysis can help identify patterns and threats across complex datasets. Automated processing can also reduce officers’ exposure to psychologically harmful material.
At the same time, criminals are adopting AI rapidly, creating new challenges and making existing crime more sophisticated, scalable and difficult to detect. For police organisations, the potential application of AI is growing quickly. So is the need for policing organisations to understand how criminals may use the technology, how this will affect operational demands and what technology environment is required to respond effectively.
Criminals don’t operate within the same guardrails
Police organisations need to adopt AI within legal, ethical and operational frameworks. Privacy, security, transparency, human oversight and accountability all need to be considered as new capabilities are introduced.
Criminals face none of those organisational constraints. They can adopt emerging technologies quickly, using AI to scale cybercrime, create deepfakes and synthetic media, automate activity and make existing forms of crime more sophisticated.
This creates an important challenge for policing. Agencies need to keep pace with rapidly changing technology while maintaining the safeguards expected of them. The answer is not to reduce those safeguards. It is to build the capability to adopt and adapt technology responsibly at greater speed.
AI needs the right foundations
AI capabilities do not operate in isolation. Their effectiveness depends on the systems, information and workflows they need to work with to ensure sufficient context.
As AI becomes part of the operational environment, policing organisations need access to relevant and reliable information to produce useful outputs and respond to emerging criminal methods. This makes it increasingly important to control what data AI can access and to ensure that data sovereignty, guardrails and organisational policies are consistently enforced. Strong information governance and data quality are therefore essential foundations for adopting AI responsibly.
Police organisations need clear AI policies, governance frameworks and controls that define how AI can be used, where human oversight is required and how accountability is maintained organisation-wide.
This is particularly important when AI moves beyond administrative tasks and begins to support analysis or decision-making. Human judgement remains central. Practitioners must be able to review AI-assisted outputs, understand the information behind them and recognise where AI-generated material may be inaccurate, manipulated or deliberately designed to mislead.
That scrutiny can extend beyond the investigation itself. The data AI uses, the outputs it produces and how those outputs inform decisions may also be challenged in court, making clear traceability and the ability to explain how information has been handled increasingly important.
That accountability also applies to externally supplied AI capabilities. Introducing AI from an external technology provider does not transfer responsibility for how it is used. Organisations need the governance, oversight and technology environment to remain in control of that use.
Modernise for what comes next
If the technology environment is part of AI readiness, modernisation decisions being made today need to consider both the capabilities policing organisations may need in the future and the ways criminals may use AI against them.
Digitising a submission process or improving interoperability may not be driven by AI. But these projects create an opportunity to establish the structured information, secure integration, governance and connected workflows that emerging capabilities will depend on.
This matters as the volume and complexity of information in policing continues to grow. AI is expected to play a greater role in helping organisations manage that scale, reduce manual workloads, support faster analysis and respond to increasingly sophisticated criminal activity.
The technology foundations being put in place today will influence how readily those capabilities can become part of operational workflows – and how effectively organisations can adapt when criminals adopt new technologies.
For bdna, these technology foundations are a natural extension of the modernisation work we already do with police and forensic organisations. The Bdna Public Safety Platform connects forensic, evidence and case management in a single secure environment, supporting trusted information from crime scene to courtroom.
As AI becomes a greater part of policing, AI strategy and technology modernisation will need to evolve together. The foundations organisations put in place today will determine how readily they can adapt to what comes next.
