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drugs, (s)he may be stopped for a check based on the Law on Opium. If there is no
such suspicion, however, an officer is not allowed to evoke the Road Traffic Law
for the sole purpose of conducting a drug-control. Such action would lead to
détournement de pouvoir
(misuse of powers), which often results in related evi-
dence being excluded from the lawsuit. Thus, the augmented reality-adagio of
'aiding officers to select vehicles worth inspection' does not always hold. It only
does if there are sufficient legal grounds for suspicion. If an officers observes a
number of signs that (s)he relates to drug-trafficking, the officer has the right to
approach that person as a formal suspect and use the mandates that follow from
that suspicion. The question is whether clues detected by artificial sensors can lead
to the same mandates. Of course, the value of a profile is as good as the intelli-
gence used to make it. The drug-trafficking case, in which 6 of the 10 vehicles se-
lected for inspection resulted in the detection of major drug offenses, proves that
human intelligence of some experienced officers can successfully be used to aug-
ment the reality of many fellow officers.
At the moment of writing, the Ministry of Security and Justice (Ministerie van
Veiligheid en Justitie) is drafting a law in which police officers are mandated to
register license plate information using technology. To further the public debate
on the incorporation of technology in policing we forward two thoughts for con-
sideration. First, although in the drug trafficking case license plates have been
used to recognize criminal behavior it should be considered to draft the law in
more abstract terms. This would expand the range from the public road to other
public domains such as railways, waterways, or cyberspace, Characteristics other
than license plates (e.g. RFID) could be more but also less privacy intrusive, pro-
viding the police with alternatives to bring their approach in line with the juridical
principles of subsidiarity, proportionality, and the linkage between ends and
means. And second, neither current laws nor the law-in-preparation do provide for
the forming of legal grounds for suspicion based on 'technological' assessments.
The question is, of course, how purely technical these observations are. Indeed, in
an augmented reality, based on an interpretive-constructivist epistemology, the di-
vision between the physical and the virtual world is diminishing. As a conse-
quence, the question should not be whether an observation is physical or synthetic,
but up to what degree the observation can be verified and trusted.
9.5 Conclusion
Like Ratcliffe, we believe that KBP 'requires police leaders to learn and embrace
a new way of thinking about knowledge' (2007:2). In this chapter we made this
plea specific by proposing to adopt an interpretive-constructivist epistemological
perspective, reformulating the key-concepts of ILP and KBP accordingly, and
forward boundary objects as means to 1) help bridging the gap between different
fields of discipline, and 2) serve as knowledge structure for the creation of aug-
mented realities. Moreover, what counts for police leaders is just as true for soci-
ety at large: augmenting reality in police operations has consequences that should
be considered with care. In this chapter we provided the first sketches of the con-
sequences of augmented reality for large-scale data-processing, the protection of
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