The Future Policing Institute was established in 2019 as a vehicle for anchoring foresight and innovation to the culture of policing. It provides professional consulting services, mentoring of policing leaders, futures briefs and commentary on those issues affecting the future of policing. It is a gateway to the discipline of futures studies for laypeople interested in understanding and creating preferred futures.

The Institute is a practitioner, policymaker and community member-focused knowledge organization. It examines issues and technologies that will affect policing in the future. And it is predicated on the belief that the best way to predict the future of policing is to create it. 

The Institute blends together multiple areas of interest its leadership believe are critical to creating, leading and interacting with a forward leaning, constitutionally correct and “rightful” model of policing. Some of these include futures studies, strategic foresight, political impacts on policing, societal trends and evolution, community policing, organizational culture, the re-engineering of policing, evidence based policing, harm reduction, officer safety and wellness, organizational development, systems thinking, preventable error, learning organizations, community building, climate change impacts on policing, and technology.

The Institute emphasizes it’s interest in the impacts of technology on policing – now and in the future. While policing is a consumer of technology, it has focused little attention on the consequences of adopting certain technologies. Few police organizations, for instance, have “police technologists” whose responsibility it is not only to seek out new technologies beneficial to the organization, but also to help leaders understand the ramifications of the technology.

This is especially true for artificial intelligence (AI). Many believe that it may, at once, be the greatest of all human creations and the most harmful. This may very well be true for policing. How police leaders view and use AI in the future will have a direct impact on policing’s rightful nature. Balancing the benefits with the inherent risk in such a powerful technological advance will be as challenging to future policing leaders as any they, or their predecessors, have faced. As such, The Institute places high value on helping police leaders, policymakers and community members understand what AI is and what it is currently capable of, and most importantly, what it will be, and do, in the future.

Other disruptive technologies that impact policing the Institute is tracking include, but are not limited to, mobile devices, social media, body worn cameras, drones, facial recognition, self-driving vehicles, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Dark Web, deep fake videos, sentiment analysis, open data, geographic information systems (GIS).

The Future Policing Institute articulates perspectives on these, and other issues, to stimulate thought and discussion about how policing can be thoughtfully directed toward a preferred future policing.