{"id":1401,"date":"2020-02-17T00:05:19","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T15:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/?p=1401"},"modified":"2020-02-17T00:05:19","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T15:05:19","slug":"china-sets-up-national-laboratory-for-advanced-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/2020\/02\/17\/china-sets-up-national-laboratory-for-advanced-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"China sets up national laboratory for advanced policing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/5cc651a4-48fd-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d?fbclid=IwAR1NlwMV-1jKZWbj3Qf0SM86QuZiujrDPOOIdGkFqkhXqfpk84dqhtVYdNk<\/a>
Yuan Yang<\/a>\u00a0in Beijing and\u00a0Madhumita Murgia<\/a>\u00a0in London\u00a0FEBRUARY 11 2020 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/5cc651a4-48fd-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d?fbclid=IwAR1NlwMV-1jKZWbj3Qf0SM86QuZiujrDPOOIdGkFqkhXqfpk84dqhtVYdNk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s biggest military technology company has set up a national laboratory to research advanced policing technologies such as crime prediction and emotion recognition, giving its first wave of grants to academics across China \u2014 as well as one lab in the UK.\n\nThe flagship lab, which does not have a physical presence but is a network of researchers, is owned by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned defence company that has longstanding partnerships with the Chinese police and military.\n\nIts research endeavours include anticipating where crimes might happen based on extrapolating from previous spatial patterns, reconciling surveillance footage from different cameras to piece together a person\u2019s movements and using video to automatically recognise their emotions.\n\nThe development of the lab, which is called the National Engineering Laboratory (NEL) for Big Data Application on Social Security Risks Sensing, Prevention and Control, comes as police forces around the world look to data analytics and machine learning to attempt to predict crime and allocate patrolling resources accordingly.\n\nUS company PredPol uses algorithms to anticipate crimes in dozens of cities globally, including in the UK and the US, by dividing each city up into grids. The Metropolitan Police Service in London is currently developing similar techniques to improve patrolling.\n\nEmotion recognition is China\u2019s latest video-surveillance trend, with some city officials claiming it can be used to understand a potential suspect\u2019s mental state. However, other experts say the technology is yet to see proven benefits.\n\nWhile the NEL said it disburses grants with the aim of improving policing efficiency and preventing \u201csocial security incidents\u201d, its first research centre was unveiled in 2017 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the Chinese border region where around 1.8m Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are interned in mass camps under a security clampdown.\n\nThe new lab has partnerships with China\u2019s central police training academy in Beijing, as well as with local police in Xinjiang. Its only physical locations appear to be the Urumqi research centre and another facility in Beijing.\n\nAccording to documents leaked to local media, the NEL\u2019s Beijing office awarded a first wave of 16 grants of up to Rmb3m ($430,000) in 2018. The grantees were selected by a panel including Xinjiang\u2019s deputy police chief, Fan Lixin.\n\nThe Financial Times contacted all of the grant recipients, but almost all either refused interviews or would only speak off the record about their projects, citing the political sensitivity of their work. The only willing interviewee was Professor Tao Cheng at University College London, who was also the only overseas grant recipient.\n\nMs Cheng\u2019s lab, known as the UCL Space Time Lab, analyses large data sets to create hourly or daily crime prediction maps for clients including the UK\u2019s Metropolitan Police. Ms Cheng confirmed that she had been given grant funding from the NEL, but said that her work is not yet involved in policing in China.\n\n\u201cRight now it\u2019s just public safety; we haven\u2019t started working on crime incidents. But we are exploring opportunities in China,\u201d she said. \u201cAt the moment we aren\u2019t doing anything [in Xinjiang], and even if there was [an opportunity], it would be to predict domestic crimes and things, not for surveillance.\u201d\n\nChina\u2019s police force is overstretched for the size of the population it serves, with 1.4 police officers per 1,000 people in China, according to Interpol, making it one of the least-policed countries in the world.\n\nBut Beijing\u2019s broad and often politicised definition of crime, and the unchecked powers of the police force, have given human rights defenders concern over the country\u2019s innovations in police tech, and to what extent the research outcomes could be deployed in Xinjiang.\n\n\u201cThe NEL\u2019s research will likely tell the Chinese authorities how to fine-tune [their] control of minorities in Xinjiang, as well as help inform police across the country,\u201d said Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, who first came across the grant-making documents.\n\n\u201cWe are seeing a race to the bottom in China \u2014 police bureaus competing to see who can implement mass surveillance and repression better,\u201d added Ms Wang.\n\nCETC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\n\nAdditional reporting by Nian Liu\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/5cc651a4-48fd-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d?fbclid=IwAR1NlwMV-1jKZWbj3Qf0SM86QuZiujrDPOOIdGkFqkhXqfpk84dqhtVYdNk Yuan Yang\u00a0in Beijing and\u00a0Madhumita Murgia\u00a0in London\u00a0FEBRUARY 11 2020 Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4,5],"class_list":["post-1401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-human-rights","tag-mass-detention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1401"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1403,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions\/1403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}