- Elizabeth Johnston
Welcome to the Efus podcast, a podcast produced by the European Forum for Urban Security, in collaboration with the Icarus Project, Innovative Approaches to Urban Security. I'm Elizabeth Johnston, the Executive Director of Efus, the European network of 250 local and regional authorities dedicated to urban security policies. I'm very glad today to be joined by Ravinithesh Annapureddy researcher at IDIAP Research Institute and EPFL in Switzerland. and by Stanislav Seko, head of strategic planning at the Municipal Police of Riga in Latvia. Welcome to both of you. In this episode, we'll be discussing the IcARUS project and the role of technology. So first question to both of you, does technology really support advancing security?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
Yes, technology can be a significant support in advancing the solutions for modern urban security problems, but also to the existing ones.
- Staņislavs Šeiko
So, yes, of course, because first of all, we need to understand that there are a lot of modern changes in the modern cities. And, of course, probably all of us, I'm speaking now from the position of police, are facing the main problem, the lack of personnel. There is a lack of personnel on police resources, but still the responsibilities and competencies are growing up because the police is the only institution who works 24-7. So in case of Riga, we as police need to deal not only with typical crimes or domestic violence, but controlling the welfare of pets or controlling hostile drones, for example. So the competence is growing, the personnel is lacking, and how we can deal with it? Only using by different kind of technological tools, artificial intellect, and so on.
- Elizabeth Johnston
From your academic perspective, Ravi Nitesh, how can technology support solving urban security challenges?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
Yes, I'll build upon what Stan has said earlier. I mean, most visibly every day, all of us will see a lot of security cameras going around the streets. But that's only one part of technology, which is looking at what's happening on the streets. But on the other hand, we can use technology to improve the communication between the law enforcement agencies, security agencies, and the public through social media, through community platforms that will enhance collaboration. But at the same time, we have lots and lots of data coming every day on our way, either through the cameras or through event logs or through the police records. So the data analysis, data analytics, and these kind of softwares will help solving the modern urban security problems.
- Elizabeth Johnston
What about Riga?
- Staņislavs Šeiko
I totally agree because Ravinithesh mentioned these classical types of using of technologies like CCTV, video surveillance, or some kind of mobile application to communicate between police officers and citizens. But still, yeah, data is probably the most difficult thing to work because for a long, long time, police have its own statistics. And a lot of decisions around police strategies, police tactics is based on police statistics. And in the modern world, this police statistics is just a big mess of data. You need to interpret, you need to analyze. And if you do it only using your brains or analytical specialists, you can fail somewhere because the amount of data is growing very fast. And yes, in case of Riga, we have faced this problem that we have this police statistics data. And with the police statistics, it sometimes is a problem. Can you trust the police statistics? Because you see, if people are calling the police, it can seem that the situation is very bad. But in fact, it couldn't. Or if you have a lot of patrol cars on the street, you will face a lot of incidents, and the statistics show you that the situation is horrible. But in fact, if you push out the police cars from the streets, the situation seems to become better. And in fact, it's not, conversely. So we started dealing with this statistical data, trying to analyze it, to visualize using the artificial intellect. or mapping tools and so on. But still, we have faced out that we need to get additional feedback from the citizens about their feeling of insecurity, because there is no correlation between police statistics, between data and the feeling of people. In the most safest area, citizens can still feel unsafe and vice versa. That's why, together with our academic partners in IcARUS project, and Ravinithesh is also present here, we decided to make a tool that will bring together this quantitative data of police statistics and qualitative data from citizen surveys about feeling of insecurity and to map it, to analyze it, to have ad hoc decisions on changing police tactics. Not like waiting for one or two years to receive the results of like large citizen survey. No, we don't need it. In fact, we need to make a decision now to make better tomorrow. This is a tool for safer Riga that brings together these police statistics and citizens'perception of feeling of insecurity, of trust issues to the police, and also that makes better the communication between the public institutions and the society.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Ravinithesh, have you met specific obstacles in the context of this project?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
From an academic perspective, one of the important things is citizen engagement, building tools that are community-based and community-developed because at the end of the day, we want it to be an inclusive and also a collaborative approach. As Stan was mentioning, they already have police statistics and they were making decisions based on it for years now. But bringing all of these people who are stakeholders in maintaining urban security, it's important and it's difficult to choose the right people. And it's also difficult, equally difficult to define who are the right people to involve in this process. And then bringing them out of their comfort zone or bringing them and making them understand these participatory processes is one of the biggest hurdles. In addition, this is not particularly relevant for Riga, but usually when we are using technology in urban security settings or in technology anywhere, Financial costs are very important to be considered because many times they take the second step, they take the back seat and we just go and say, oh, we are going to use this artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms to solve problems. But we tend to forget that they are also financially burdened in the cities, especially in these times when we are lacking budgets and there are budget cuts. The second thing I want to add on this is also the technology competencies, which Stan was mentioning earlier. As new technology comes in, we also want to people, we also want the citizens, stakeholders, police, personal, community organizations to be part of these changes. But not necessarily everyone is equipped with these skills to deal with them, to use them, and to be part of these processes. So I think these are the three main hurdles.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Have you met other obstacles in Riga, Stanislav?
- Staņislavs Šeiko
Yes. First of all, I totally agree about this perspective on people, on community. Because without the community, we are nothing. And we want to establish this trust and involve them to participate. That sometimes can be a problem. And second feature or issue, the modern city, especially big city with a lot of citizens, is not like the one territory you can use just one police tactics or one type of approach or survey. That is a problem with big surveys that is held in cities. Because if you want to go deeper in the specific of certain district, for example, of old town or like commercial district or something, you see that the situation is like average everywhere. Indeed, it's not. So if you want to focus on certain area, you need to prepare or to have the certain type of questions that suitable or reliable for this area. And then to go and intervene. in certain location. For example, in Riga we have 58 different neighborhoods and if we want to change our policing tactics in certain neighborhoods we need to go with a certain type of questions in the certain district. And that's what we tried to do with our tool in eCourse project. For example, for piloting and testing in certain neighborhood we created together with Academical Partners the set of questions that is focusing on the problems or territories or architecture. of this location. And when we are going to use this tool in other districts, we'll adapt this question. So this tool is not like something, some kind of product that you made once and never changed. No. The city is changing, the society is growing, new trends appear, and also these components of the tool also will be changed and adapted.
- Elizabeth Johnston
You both spoke about local specificities. and also about how to make citizens actively participate in the co-creation and implementation of technology-driven solutions. Would you want to add anything to this specific point?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
I can add a bit on what, this is an example I'm picking up from Stan from his recent talk where You go to a hospital and you measure temperatures of a lot of people and then you will always have an average temperature which is probably good, everybody is healthy. But maybe there are extreme cases where somebody is having high fever and someone is having a very low temperature which means they're not there. So it's important to understand that an average approach, a to all approach is not anymore an acceptable thing and we have to understand and solve the problems at a very micro scale. But that does not mean we're going to solve it for each individual. So we will have aggregation at some level, but we also need to have to find a balance between this individual changes that we can make for each person, but also at a very high level of the city. And the second thing about local context, local engagement is local engagement is about the fact that you have to interest everyone. Maybe in the 58 neighborhoods of Riga, Few people in few sections of neighborhoods are very interested to take part in this solution or in this technological solution and making the city happy and safe. But maybe not everybody is having that. So it is important that we take them on board as well and understand why they are not in it or why they are in it.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Would you say that trust is the big issue?
- Staņislavs Šeiko
Yes, of course. Because the problem of trust or topic of trust between citizens and the police is a hot topic even in sociology research and in policy planning. So yes, of course, and undoubtedly we can say that there is a lack of trust always because probably we will agree that the police is quite like orthodox organization, sometimes too conservative, sometimes going into society with this issue of power. And if we want to have this balance between power and between the trust we need to engage these different stakeholders. And also in context of stakeholders it always sounds very politically popular to say oh we need to involve stakeholders but indeed in a context of certain districts the stakeholders can differ. So if we look on like a bird's eye perspective on the city we'll probably see like two or three types of stakeholders like some kind of citizens NGO, some kind of municipal coordinators, workers and police for example. But if we go deeper in the certain location, in the certain neighborhood, we see how the amount of involved or interested stakeholders is growing. It can be the local community of bicycle riders, it can be the local school, it can be the community of parents and so on and so on. And when we are going deeper, From the bird eye to the frog eye, coming closer, we see that there are a lot of different participant stakeholders we need to establish the contact and then this feeling of trust appears.
- Elizabeth Johnston
What about ethical considerations to using technology?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
From an academic point of view, ethical considerations are a very important step and in this modern day where technology is becoming more of a black box. thing and a lot of people do not understand it, do not know how to use it, we should give priority to it. At the same time, it's also important to strike balance between public safety and also personal and societal rights because we cannot go on one of the extremes and then assume the problem is solved. So we have to give priority to understanding people's interests and also, as Stan mentioned earlier, about the trust, which is also an important step in building ethical considerations. If I can add, the other ethical thing which we tend to not consider it as ethical is the knowledge about the technologies. I mean every day we speak, we have new data protection law, we have new UAI Act that is coming in. These are all acts but are the citizens or the stakeholders who want to engage in these processes, do they know about them? Are they ready to talk? Are they ready to contribute in these engagement processes? It is very easy to call a group of people for a meeting to discuss about certain technology. But if they are not empowered to talk about them, if they do not have the power or knowledge about these topics, I think they are at a disadvantaged position. So we also have to keep in mind these kind of implications that are not obviously on the top. But as you go deeper, you understand them.
- Elizabeth Johnston
You spoke about European legislation. How do you consider it?
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
The impact of the EU-AIR Act has yet to be studied because very soon they want to... bring that into force presumably starting next year. So we do have a lot of technologies and a lot of us do not know that we are using AI in our everyday life and all of these services are going to get affected with this and it is yet to be studied on how individual applications. Choices are going to be affected with the effect of this act. And there are multiple layers to it that we have to learn and deal with.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Stanislavs, what about ethical considerations at the local level?
- Staņislavs Šeiko
So from our perspective as a police, it's a little bit easier for us with European regulations about all this data protection and so on, because we have a certain purpose, why we're using this data, why we work with this data to provide this public safety. And when we as a state institution, as police work in these borders of this aim, then it's easier for us because we have this police directive and so on. So it's not like typical institutions that goes to get any kind of data for any kind of survey or something. So it's easier for us and we're always very correct working in the boundaries of balance, of privacy. and of public safety. So we need always to be very certain with this ethical consideration because, again, returning to the case or topic of the trust, we want people to trust us, that we are using their data to protect them from other hostile people, not because we just want to, like, you know, Big Brother is watching you. No, in this case, we are not Big Brother who wants to get in their bed. And, yeah. to follow them everywhere.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Is there a kind of a balance between academic and local points of view? How do you work together?
- Staņislavs Šeiko
Probably it's not a question about like balance between just us two, because if we have any like good goal or aim, for example, public safety, there should be a balance between three parties, professionals as a police, academics who can support us with their knowledge, and also the third party is community. So if we go only two of us, we can do something maybe very wonderful and beautiful. But in fact, the community don't need it. So we need to come all together, all us three parties, and then we'll achieve our goal. It's my point of view.
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
I completely agree with Stan on having a tripartite setup instead of the two of us. It's also important that many times that we bring technology from someplace to this place. as an industry or as academic people. But unless we have their support, unless we balance the quantitative knowledge that we have with the community knowledge, with the community expertise from the local citizens, we cannot find the right balance between what we want to implement or what we want to achieve in terms of public security. Or in general, this goes beyond urban security or in general about any public policy.
- Staņislavs Šeiko
Yes, in fact, it's like evidence-based evaluation, evidence-based methodology. We need to go deeper in the context of the local place we want to implement it, not to bring something from another country or maybe from the best academic research, but that could be unuseful in a certain area or certain city.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Thank you, Stanislav.
- Staņislavs Šeiko
Thank you, Elisabeth.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Thank you, Ravinithesh.
- Ravinithesh Annapureddy
Thank you, Elisabeth. Thank you very much.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Many thanks to our guests and thank you to our audience for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which was produced in the framework of the IcARUS Project, funded by the European Commission. We look forward to sharing more insights and discussions with you in the future. So don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and visit our website of the European Forum for Urban Security. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Efus podcast.
