Police services worldwide have undergone a period of great change over the last 50 years. Technology has been an integral factor in the introduction of new systems of management. From those technologies that have led to the establishment of criminal records that can be digitally stored and searched rapidly using fingerprint matching to the electronic tracking of persons of interest using global positioning systems (GPS), and the automated number plate recognition (ANPR) monitoring of vehicles. Police today can communicate using mobile social media for faster response times, search Facebook on the go, and even record direct evidence using body-worn video recorders. We have indeed moved away from a paper-based and centralised police station view in a given local area command (LAC), to a more decentralised architecture with distributed processing which enables the sharing of digital information not only within a police force but between police forces in different jurisdictions.

Streams of data now flow through police services via hundreds of different touch-point types, whether from a mobile node such as a police patrol vehicle or a fixed node like a large dedicated policing data store. The systems integration of these online touch points present great opportunities for big data analytical processes. Rich text, audio and visual data streams, some of them real-time feeds, are just sitting dormant waiting to be analysed, adorned with time and date stamps, geographic stamps and other contextual information that can be semantically processed. How to shift from a reactive policing mode in response to a crime, toward a proactive mode toward criminalisation to prevent crime is at the heart of advanced situational awareness techniques being considered for deployment. The basic premise is if retail trend patterns of consumer buying behaviour can emerge from big data gathered in private organisations, then surely the same techniques can be applied to the policing sector to denote where and when a criminal is likely to strike.

First, this paper argues that proactive criminalisation is a breach of basic human rights and that the real-time or near real-time monitoring of citizens or property en masse can only lead to long-term harm of individuals and negative psychological effects in communities. Secondly, as big data is inextricably intertwined with open data initiatives, the erosion of personal privacy can be expected, doing away with old paradigms of taking out a warrant on a person and judicial oversight in the name of transparency. These technological processes may act to reduce the frequency of certain crime types in the short term, but they will also lead to misinformation, misinterpretation, and information manipulation of the facts, implicating innocent people on all sides and leading to a state of uberveillance.