Conference explores AI’s role in policing and legal surveillance

Speakers at the national conference on ‘Political dimensions of legal surveillance: A critical perspective’ deliberated upon the role of Artificial Intelligence (AL) in policing in India and the opportunities and risks involved in the process.

The one-day meet was organised by Sri Venkateswara University’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration here on Friday (March 13, 2026), where Kranthi Kumar Gadidesi, Inspector General of Police, Jharkhand, delivered the keynote address on ‘Combating negative impact of AI and Machine Learning (ML) police investigations’.

While AI had become an inevitable part of ‘Smart policing’, taking a paradigm shift from reactive policing to proactive policing and further to predictive policing, he pointed to the enhanced usage of technologies like facial recognition, crime mapping analytics, and anomaly detection systems to aid the decision-making process.

He made a specific mention of the ethical dilemmas concerning privacy, bias, and accountability due to the deployment of algorithmic systems, potentially risking action for breach of constitutional provisions.

Mr. Gadidesi’s presentation included the perceived benefits of AI as well as the barriers in adopting it in policing such as infrastructure gaps, organisational resistance, regulatory uncertainty, skill deficiency, financial constraints and dependence on vendors.

SVU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Tata Narasinga Rao called AI as the order of the day, notwithstanding its negative side. “Even universities and institutions have started offering courses on AI and hence it cannot be wished away,” he added.

Conference convener and professor of political science B.V. Muralidhar pointed to the Watergate scandal of 1972 and the recent ‘Epstein Files’ episode to highlight the way technology as well as surveillance mechanism had been used in political espionage to corner the influential.

Thirty students gave presentations on the above theme at the conference.