Bradford, Benjamin;
Kyprianides, Arabella;
Andrews, Will;
Aston, Elizabeth;
Clayton, Estelle;
O'Neil, Megan;
Wells, Helen;
(2025)
'To whom am I speaking?'; Public responses to crime reporting via live chat with human versus AI police operators.
Policing and Society
10.1080/10439463.2025.2453437.
(In press).
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Abstract
Driven by social and technological change and the imperative to enhance efficiency, police have in recent years adopted various technologies to transform their interactions with the public. In the UK, these initiatives often fall under "transformation" agendas, promoting "channel choice" strategies to facilitate public interactions through various technologically mediated platforms, such as reporting crimes online using form-based or chat functions. Artificial Intelligence already plays a role in some of these interactions, which is likely only to increase in the future. In this study we examine preferences and perceptions in online crime reporting. Participants read a fictitious ‘chat’ between a victim of crime and a police operator identified as either a human or a chatbot. Although the chats were identical, we find a consistent preference for human operators over chatbots across all scenarios. Human operators were thought to provide clearer explanations, although there were no significant differences in judgements of interpersonal treatment or decision neutrality between human and chatbot operators. Participants also responded more positively to the process when (a) the crime involved was less serious and (b) when the outcome was active (police attendance) rather than passive (simple recording). Our findings underscore the importance of procedural justice and communication clarity in online crime reporting systems – and perhaps of human interaction when reporting crimes.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | 'To whom am I speaking?'; Public responses to crime reporting via live chat with human versus AI police operators |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/10439463.2025.2453437 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2025.2453437 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | online crime reporting; AI operator; human operator; procedural justice |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Security and Crime Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203173 |
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