Future of policing

In the coming decades, law enforcement will face an increasingly digitalized and complex world.  As technological advances push the boundaries between the physical and the digital, the criminal landscape continues to become more transnational and more sophisticated.

With this rapidly evolving digital landscape, policing will therefore face new challenges and opportunities.

/

INTERPOL’s collaborative approach to exploring the future

Given this situation, what will the future of policing look like in the years to come? And even more importantly, what can law enforcement do now to prepare for these impending transformations?

/

To answer this question, the INTERPOL Innovation Centre has launched a major initiative to shape the future of policing. This initiative includes a range of activities, which will take place over 2023, including interviews with chiefs of police, young upcoming police leaders as well as global business and academics leaders, dedicated Virtual Rooms and in-person conferences.

/

These various activities will culminate in the development of strategic recommendations on the future of policing, in time for the Organization’s hundredth anniversary. This Centenary provides us with an opportunity to look backwards as well as forwards to our shared perspective on global policing.

The INTERPOL Working Paper on the Future of Policing

As a first step, the Innovation Centre has produced a Working Paper on the Future of Policing. The paper examines the future operational environment of law enforcement; how the mission, duties and capabilities of policing could evolve; and what we can do to prepare for these transformations.

We will update the Working Paper throughout the year with new input and suggestions, following activities held under the Future of Policing initiative.

The INTERPOL Future of Policing Congress

With the aim of helping law enforcement agencies worldwide to prepare for operating in a rapidly changing global security landscape and help prepare law enforcement agencies worldwide for the future, INTERPOL organized its first-ever Future of Policing Congress in collaboration with the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) in Incheon, Republic of Korea, on 23-24 October 2024.

The Future of Policing Congress was built as a future foresight hands-on workshop, bringing together law enforcement leaders, industry experts, academics, and stakeholders from various sectors to picture the potential future scenarios, understand their implications on law enforcement, and prepare law enforcement agencies for future-readiness.

This event serves as a platform for Member Countries to explore what are the global ‘megatrends’, to identify their potential impacts in the policing field, and devise actionable steps to prepare law enforcement for the emerging trends and threats ahead.

This year, the Congress was divided into 3 different sessions.

• Session 1. Painting the Future(s) Scenarios. The first session looked at future scenarios from 5 different dimensions including social, technological, economic, environmental, and geopolitical landscapes.
• Session 2. How will the Future(s) impact Law Enforcement. The second session focused on the impacts of these scenarios on the evolution of crimes, policing duties, data and evidence, changing models of policing, and trust and citizen’s expectations.
• Session 3. How will Law Enforcement need to Adjust and be Prepared. Last but not least, the third session delved into how law enforcement should prepare for the future in terms of equipment and tools, skillsets, processes and procedures, organizational structures, and international cooperation.

The sample scenario cards below generated during the Congress using AI capture some of the likely future scenarios identified and discussed by the participants for each of the dimensions covered in Session 1.

/