A SCOPING REVIEW OF CURRENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS AND OUTCOMES IN CRIME PREVENTION AND THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Sammanfattning

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming a more prominent tool and being implemented in more fields, day by day, it is important to bring the necessary attention to it. This thesis investigates the evolving role of AI in crime prevention and the ethical concerns behind it. One of the main issues of applying AI globally is its western-focused training methods, which create numerous issues for groups of people that fall outside of those western standards. For this reason, this thesis not only explores the various applications and techniques of AI, such as predictive policing and the outcome of the AI in crime prevention, for example faster data processing from Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) but also makes use of non-western focused literature and brings forth the ethical issues of AI. Through the use of a scoping review, which includes existing literature and an analysis of current implementations, it aims to map the current state of the fields, while also providing constructive critiques about the ethical implications and societal impact. It expands on previous research, which mainly focuses on what AI can offer, but not the ethical issues that AI creates. Through the chosen method, it becomes clear that AI can enhance traditional means of crime prevention but also can cause a lot of privacy, discrimination and algorithmic bias issues. This thesis concludes that even though Artificial Intelligence has gone through rapid and great changes and it’s a tool that can improve current crime prevention means, it needs to be under constant monitoring and not taken as a panacea.