How can we best communicate and understand the public’s perception of autonomous vehicles and drone usage in policing?

Background

"Mobility is the ability to move to/from locations quickly to prevent, detect or respond, including to access difficult locations safely to maximise intelligence and minimise risk.

Autonomous vehicles, and particularly a combination of drones and fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, offer a faster, safer, cheaper, and more sustainable means of frontline deployment and advanced evidence capture. The National Police Air Service and the National Police Chiefs' Council’s National Lead for Drones have a joint strategy that sets out in detail the technical challenges we must overcome to be able to operate a suite of complementary response options. These relate to concerns over line-of-sight flying, safety, cybersecurity, costs of replacement and maintenance, expertise required to use, and poor battery life. Each of these need to be addressed alongside extensive consultation to ensure policing’s use is understood by the public, considered proportionate, and supported."

Next steps

"We welcome your engagement with our ARIs in the following ways:
• If you have evidence that completely or partly supports or answers one of our ARIs, we invite you to share that with us. For any ongoing research relevant to policing and crime reduction, we encourage you to register your research on the College of Policing’s research projects map, which has been designed to promote collaboration and support requests for participants.
• If you are, or plan to be, carrying out research that relates to one of our ARIs, we’d like to hear about it. While we cannot respond to speculative approaches for research funding, we will where possible act to support your ambitions, including finding you policing partners where possible.
• If you are submitting a funding or grant application that aligns with one of our ARIs, we hope that referencing policing’s ARIs will help to strengthen your case for the possible public impact of the research.
• We will use the ARI document to structure our academic engagement, prioritise events and build new connections with external partners. We will be using our ARIs in our engagement with UKRI, and we will publish any opportunities for funding via our website https://science.police.uk/
Please send any correspondence and questions to csa@npcc.police.uk, including ‘ARI’ in the subject heading."

Source

This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:

Policing Areas of Research Interest

Related UKRI funded projects


  • Home Office The impact of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on Policing service delivery UKRI Policy Fellowship

    Each fellowship will last up to 18 months to cover: a 3-month inception phase for set up activity a 12-month placement with the host organisation an impact phase lasting up to 3 months Fellows will co-design projects a...

    Funded by: ESRC

    Lead research organisation: Keele University

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it focuses on the impact of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on Policing service delivery, but does not specifically address public perception.

  • Diversifying Drone Stories

    (1) RESEARCH CONTEXT: Following its establishment as a now-iconic warfighting tool, the drone increasingly features in domestic airspace. The domestic drone's meteoric rise is evident in the UK Government's ongoing inves...

    Funded by: ESRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Reading

    Why might this be relevant?

    Fully relevant as it critically examines the domestic drone's growing mobilization in day-to-day life in the UK, including policing, and its impact on public perception.

  • Drones to Protect: Shared-Value Analysis of Aerial Surveillance during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Ethical Framework Development for Future Crises

    Aerial surveillance has been central to the discussion of intervention during the pandemic with an undeniable ability to become a central force in the fight against COVID-19 due to a wide spectrum of applications. Howev...

    Funded by: ISCF

    Lead research organisation: WECORP LTD

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it focuses on aerial surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic and ethical framework development, but does not specifically address public perception of autonomous vehicles and drones in policing.

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