Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Policing in the Indian Criminal Justice System: Methods, Applications and Constitutional Concerns

Abstract

What was speculative a decade ago is now routine, as the algorithms have entered the everyday machinery of policing. In India, as elsewhere, law-enforcement agencies increasingly rely on computational tools for crime mapping, facial recognition, forensic analysis and the allocation of manpower. This paper focus on the critical study by unpacking what predictive policing actually means, then places of Indian experience against the older trajectories of the United States, the United Kingdom and China – jurisdictions from which India has borrowed its technologies and less consciously, its problems. The Indian scenario is surveyed in detail: Delhi’s crime-mapping platform, the state-level experience of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Punjab and Kerala, the Bureau of Police Research and Development’s women’s-safety project, and the quieter adoption of AI by forensic laboratories and the judiciary. These deployments are measured against the criminal procedure framework and constitutional guarantees of privacy, equality and fair trial as enshrined in various judgments of the Hon’ble Supreme Court. In the absence of a dedicated statute, algorithmic policing in India threatens to harden caste and communal prejudice, hollow out due process and shelter behind statutory opacity. The article intends to suggest by proposing legislative, institutional and technical safeguards for an accountable regime of algorithmic law enforcement.