Finding prejudice in unexpected places: racially biased perception

A series of experiments reveal that people are more likely to mistake black men as holding a gun than white men (Payne 2001; Payne et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2002). These data suggest that real-world cases of racially biased object-identification occur, such as in cases of police killings of unarmed black men. The aim of this paper is to correctly model what goes on in people’s heads, leading them to misidentify objects in these instances. One possibility is that people are making the wrong judgment about the object in question; perception might proceed as it should, but the viewer may think that they’re seeing a gun due to a cognitive error. Instead, I present a model which construes the error as a result of a visual illusion: even though the object is a hand tool, erroneous visual processing causes them to have the illusory experience of a gun

National Security, Religious Anarchism and the Politics of Amnesty in Nigeria

The Nigerian state is caught in the crossfire of national insecurity arising from the insurgency of various rogue groups. The most prominent of these groups, and one whose activities have had far -reaching destabilising effect on the polity, is the Boko Haram sect. The Boko Haram sect, which uses the Taliban - and al-Qaeda-style terrorist tactics of suicide bombing and targeted assassination, is responsible for between 3000 and 4000 deaths since it declared war and engaged in armed insurgency in 2009. The sect has targeted and bombed state institutions, the United Nations building as well as many Christian worship centres in furtherance of its avowed objective of deploying terror to achieve the islamisation of the Nigerian state. Relying on secondary sources of data, the paper interrogates the force theory that underpins Nigeria’s security engineering and contends that the continued insecurity in the polity is a demonstration of its ineffectiveness. The paper also contends that the proposition by the Federal Government to grant amnesty to the Boko Haram sect is not as simplistic as it appears as it transcends the narrow definitional criteria of bartering forgiveness for peace. While the paper is critical of the proposed amnesty programme, it advocates a holistic approach that incorporates other issues that are promotive of justice, morality and ethicalness in the polity

The Future of Cybercrime: AI and Emerging Technologies Are Creating a Cybercrime Tsunami

This paper reviews the impact of AI and emerging technologies on the future of cybercrime and the necessary strategies to combat it effectively. Society faces a pressing challenge as cybercrime proliferates through AI and emerging technologies. At the same time, law enforcement and regulators struggle to keep it up. Our primary challenge is raising awareness as cybercrime operates within a distinct criminal ecosystem. We explore the hijacking of emerging technologies by criminals (CrimeTech) and their use in illicit activities, along with the tools and processes (InfoSec) to protect against future cybercrime. We also explore the role of AI and emerging technologies (DeepTech) in supporting law enforcement, regulation, and legal services (LawTech)

Promoting Group Justice: Fiscal Policies in Post-Conflict Countries

In the aftermath of violent conflict, governments have an opportunity to address fundamental inequalities between internal groups. As taxation and expenditure policies are developed to rebuild a functional domestic economy and infrastructure, policies can be designed to lessen divisions and promote equity.The authors assert that good data about the status quo on inequality in a country is the first step to addressing it through policy. They then discuss some options for formulating a tax code that addresses distributional issues and increases progressivity. Expenditure planning can also be designed to help create equity in income and non-income resources, such as public services, employment, health and education. The role of aid donors is discussed, particularly as a source of successful strategies gleaned from other post-conflict countries.This study is part of a series on Public Finance in Post-Conflict Environments, published jointly by PERI and New York University's Center on International Cooperation.inequality; horizontal inequality; post-conflict economies; fiscal policies; taxation incidence; expenditure incidence

Applying psychological science to the CCTV review process: a review of cognitive and ergonomic literature

As CCTV cameras are used more and more often to increase security in communities, police are spending a larger proportion of their resources, including time, in processing CCTV images when investigating crimes that have occurred (Levesley & Martin, 2005; Nichols, 2001). As with all tasks, there are ways to approach this task that will facilitate performance and other approaches that will degrade performance, either by increasing errors or by unnecessarily prolonging the process. A clearer understanding of psychological factors influencing the effectiveness of footage review will facilitate future training in best practice with respect to the review of CCTV footage. The goal of this report is to provide such understanding by reviewing research on footage review, research on related tasks that require similar skills, and experimental laboratory research about the cognitive skills underpinning the task. The report is organised to address five challenges to effectiveness of CCTV review: the effects of the degraded nature of CCTV footage, distractions and interrupts, the length of the task, inappropriate mindset, and variability in people’s abilities and experience. Recommendations for optimising CCTV footage review include (1) doing a cognitive task analysis to increase understanding of the ways in which performance might be limited, (2) exploiting technology advances to maximise the perceptual quality of the footage (3) training people to improve the flexibility of their mindset as they perceive and interpret the images seen, (4) monitoring performance either on an ongoing basis, by using psychophysiological measures of alertness, or periodically, by testing screeners’ ability to find evidence in footage developed for such testing, and (5) evaluating the relevance of possible selection tests to screen effective from ineffective screener