Bias in law enforcement has long been a problem in America. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020 most recently brought attention to this fact--sparking waves of protest across the country, and highlighting the ways in which those who are meant to "serve and protect" us do not serve all members of society equally. With the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI), a slew of new machine learning tools promise to help protect us--quickly and precisely tracking those who may commit a crime before it happens--through data. Past information about crime can be used as material for machine learning algorithms to make predictions about future crimes, and police departments are allocating resources towards prevention based on these predictions. The tools themselves, however, present a problem: The data being used to "teach" the software systems is embedded with bias, and only serves to reinforce inequality.

Crime fighting is one of the activities that have tremendously benefited from the Middle East's welcoming approach towards technology. The UAE has developed intelligent monitoring to spot traffic violations and mind fingerprinting devices have been deployed to read the truth from a suspect's brain waves. Artificial intelligence has also become central to the the Emirati law and order machinery's growth over past few years, and the authorities in Dubai recently caught an international narco kingpin using video analytics. Promising a future with more of such smart solutions for public security, students in Dubai have created a system that can predict a crime, spot a criminal and prevent offences. Backed by computer vision, the high-tech version of surveillance tools is equipped for facial recognition, and can also identify a person's emotional state to trigger preemptive action.