One of the biggest challenges identified in our research is the lack of digital ethics knowledge, expertise, and governance within forces.
Of the six forces we interviewed, five have ethics committees. However, very few forces have digital or data-specific ethics committees or expertise, relying on general ethics panels to have enough technical expertise to recognise potential digital ethics issues. Only one force in the country, West Midlands, has a specific data ethics committee.
While these committees may play a part in upholding ethical governance, such as Codes of Ethics (see next section), they do not hold any formal position of governance and act purely in an advisory capacity. This advice may not be deemed necessary by all forces, with one force telling us, “Some might say if you need an ethics committee, there's something wrong, it shouldn't be negotiable - if we're true to our values as an organisation we should be an ethical organisation and I shouldn't need a committee to tell me if I'm being ethical or not.” However, particularly as technology and ethical issues only grow more complex, it has been shown that digital ethics committees (or similar governance mechanisms) are essential to working on digital ethics matters18. Despite this, they are not in themselves sufficient for managing digital ethics issues, and our research showed that digital ethics has not yet been consistently embedded into operations in forces.
There was a significant difference in opinion amongst participants when we discussed how information about the work of ethics committees and on ethical issues in general should be shared within forces. Four participants felt that more transparency would help frontline officers apply more ethical approaches in their work; however, two disagreed and felt it would be detrimental as it would be too much of an information overload. We also found that three participants had no knowledge at all about whether their force had an ethics committee.
Digital ethics capability also does not appear to be operationalised in parts of police forces in which it could play a pivotal role. For example, those with procurement and commissioning responsibilities are not equipped to evaluate potential ethical risks of technologies, or to interrogate information from technology suppliers. For example, one participant said, “[We] talked to people involved in deployment of facial recognition technology, and in all cases operational decision makers were being told it's okay, we've got it on advice from the technology provider that their tech isn't biased. When you're in that position as an operational officer you've got no basis on which to say, how do I know if it's biased or not?”
Forces also face the broader challenge of keeping pace with the rate of change of technology. Nine of sixteen participants spanning all levels of seniority identified that this is a key issue. Forces reported that many have only rolled out laptops and smartphones in the last few years, despite these being technologies most people use in their day-to-day lives. One participant said, “Even these new smartphones that we've introduced, they're already years old, and we've got children now leaving school who've learnt coding for years who will be better than our people in our organisation naturally in computer literacy… we only got laptops a few years ago; I had my first laptop 15 years ago.”
The impact of this challenge to keep pace is twofold: forces that cannot adopt new technologies will miss opportunities to better serve the public and improve ethical concerns such as accessibility to services, as discussed above; it also means that forces will struggle to keep abreast of digital ethics concerns, which can vary from technology to technology.
