By Umar Sheraz
At the Asia Pacific Futurists Network 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anita Hazenberg, the Director of the Innovation Centre Directorate at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation. Below are some of her key insights.
Umar: Thank you very much for giving us your valuable time. How do you think foresight fits into the work of INTERPOL and how has it helped in making your organization better in performing its duties?
Anita: This is a very challenging question because futures and foresight is a very new area in our line of work. Two years ago, I was a senior police officer from the Netherlands seconded to INTERPOL. I was tasked with establishing the first Innovation Centre Directorate which is located in the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation in Singapore. A center like this did not exist before. When we started to discuss the first outlines of what we would like to become, we came up with the need for four labs for the more applied side of the Directorate focusing on digital forensics, cyberspace, Darknet, and cryptocurrencies. We felt there was also a strong need for the strategic innovation side of the house, which is very much more focused on strategic innovation; trying to see how new technologies will influence the world of policing and this is where futures and foresight have a big role to play.
One of our four labs is called the Futures & Foresight Lab. For the first time in the history of INTERPOL, we really are trying to scan the horizon continuously for what potential trends, phenomena, and other signs out there could influence law enforcement. And this was a very clear observation and conclusion from a meeting which was chaired by Professor Dr. Sohail Inayatullah of UNESCO in 2018. This was the year when we brought together in Singapore 35 strategic thinkers and advisors in law enforcement from different INTERPOL member countries. Their conclusion was that if we are not going to fundamentally change and prepare for future policing, some law enforcement functions or even organizations like INTERPOL may become obsolete. So since that time, we have assembled a small team to start this process.
Umar: How have you involved other stakeholders like academia, other policing agencies, and policymakers in your foresight work?
Anita: We have started a process of horizon scanning but we have also identified quite early, that it is not up to INTERPOL to tell how the world will look in the future. This is not our role. We don’t have any academics working with us on this specific duty in the Futures and Foresight team yet. So we realized that we had to take on-board the knowledge and frameworks of renowned academics. An important output of our discussions with Professor Sohail has been that we are trying to bring together scholarly material, crime reports, threats, analysis, future scenarios of various relevant themes together, to our library. We have also requested contributions from our member countries and at this point, we’ve got 25 member countries involved which are already doing this kind of academic research on foresight and using different tools and methods. We have brought all these materials together and now we are trying to make sense of what is emerging from these documents.
An important aspect is that we have tried to connect and make sense in relation to the three important crime programs at INTERPOL. These include counter-terrorism, cybercrime and organized and emerging crime. We have made a conscious decision not to make a collection of the trends and the phenomenon anew. Instead, we use existing material. We ask countries to make sure that the material covers the 194 member countries. So they act and then we look at the implications and impact on these three crime programs and we focus specifically on the translation into useful instruments.
A useful instrument that we are working on at the moment is a digital game. A game that can be used by police officers to build a solid police organization for the future. In the game, we include the threats which have been identified in our scanning and in our library as potential inputs. So we come up with scenarios and questions if the police are prepared, for example, if there is a drone attack with biochemicals? What will be the role of artificial intelligence, for example, in helping us with virtual autopsy? What will be the role of policing in emerging smart cities? All the time we are looking at new technologies from the perspective of a threat, a tool and as a source of evidence. That’s our outlook on technology. We have an idea of a horizon scan and we look at different avenues of turning this scan into useful and usable tools. So recently, we brought together a group of young global police leaders and asked them to look at the materials from the scan.
We also conduct dialogues with participants in what we call ‘STRATalks’ or what I call “straight talks” –talking straight about strategy. We bring them together and ask them to look at the material and find ways of making sense of it. Bringing together all this new knowledge, which is being generated all the time, in different formats and ways and still provide awareness for policing in 194 member countries, still remains a challenge.
Umar: Traditionally the role of the police has been reactive, in nature. Do you see emerging signs of police being more anticipatory and sensitized to the need for foresight?
Anita: You have hit the nail on the head. Because in my presentation in about a few minutes (at APFN 2019), I will share my three biggest challenges which are in the world of policing. Innovation is generally thought of as being nice to have but there really is a need to innovate. That for me is a big mindset challenge. Why is that so? That is because policing is reactive and we are only there when there is a big crisis. I will share my personal example. I still miss driving my car with the siren on and energy pumping through the blood in my veins. This is how I was trained and this is how I was educated, I respond and react to threats. I’m less prepared for anticipation and the whole DNA of law enforcement is similar. And on top of that, there are many factors influencing the policing environment which is shaping the trends which are influencing what happens in the world. So what we are trying to do now is very, very different. So it’s quite an interesting challenge to work on futures and foresight from an INTERPOL perspective.
Umar: So what are the big challenges in anticipation that you face in INTERPOL?
Anita: There is, for example, a big challenge identified by many police chiefs and that is big data. We have data, data, and more data. A tsunami of data. For example, we are just coming back from the first results of our scanning. The concern for us is that we might actually have the information about the next big cyber-attack in our system and we are not able to refer to it and use it for appropriate preventive measures. We have to be proactive because there is no chief of police who wants to go back to his government and say that actually the data of a potential criminal attack was available. We simply were not able to sift through all the data available and use it to prevent a terrorist event. And that potentially we could have prevented casualties. So this is where we need to join forces with academia and the business world to come up with frameworks and ways of looking at data and phenomena and help us turn it into useful information.
Umar: What is the role of innovative technologies in INTERPOL in terms of thinking about the future?
Anita: We have developed the INTERPOL Police Innovation and Technology Radar. So what we are trying to do is to see what new technology is already developed. Do police officers know what these technologies are and how have they might have applications for law enforcement? We collect these technologies and best-case examples. When law enforcement agencies, somewhere else in the world wish to start experimenting or implementing with, for example, artificial intelligence projects or drones, they can enquire if any previous initiatives are available for sharing. So for example, if some policing organization needs to deal with cryptocurrencies, then they come to us and ask about any promising law enforcement initiatives elsewhere. We also share information about academics and business companies that could be potential partners in their initiatives.
Umar: Do you have some sort of capacity building programs in place to sensitize law enforcement agencies to the need for foresight in their work?
Anita: We believe that capacity building is important but we have decided not to frame that in a program but in our products. I mentioned earlier that we developed a digital game, which is much more of use by officers of the younger generation. That’s why we gathered young global police leaders together for the first time, a few weeks ago in Dubai. Also, we keep producing white papers and other documents to continue to motivate thinking and shocking the system a little bit. We don’t want to be just organizers of training courses or meetings, we also wish to motivate our partners to think about their own contexts and what works for them.
Umar: Is there anything that you wish to convey to the JFS blog audience?
Anita: Being a senior police officer for 37 years, I have a very strong belief that we can only fight crime if we do that in close partnerships with the business world, academia, and especially our communities. We have to be carried by our communities. So we have to be a police organization which is neutral. Everyone in that community knows that we serve everyone. But this is going to be a big challenge. When we talk about the future we usually end up with discussions about new technologies, about digitalization, drones, etc., but do the people in a community recognize the new modes of policing? Where is that police? What does digital police look like? What does the police officer of the future look like? And while I find it very important that we develop technologies as a tool, prepare for new threats and deal with evidence, we also need to make sure that we have in place the ethical standards and principles to deal with these technologies. We need to question how we are going to use them so that our communities will always be able to trust us. I believe that is crucial for the future of policing.
Umar: Dear Anita, Thank you very much for your time and valuable insights.
Umar Sheraz is the blog editor of the Journal of Futures Studies and can be reached at umar_sheraz@yahoo.com. The author is grateful to Priscilla Cabuyao and Marcela Capaja at INTERPOL and Saba Nazir and Awais Nazir at JFS for their contributions towards this article.
