AI cannot do a perp walk

AI cannot do a perp walk.

As a former lawyer who has spent enough time around government decision-making, I know what actually disciplines an institution, and it is rarely the policy document. When a department, a police force or any other body with the power to compel citizens gets something badly wrong, a named human being has to sit in front of a committee, a commission or a camera and account for the decision. Anyone who has watched a senior official prepare for that morning understands how much behaviour it shapes months earlier.

That is the part of accountability we are quietly losing. The prospect of being publicly named, professionally exposed and personally held responsible is a constraint that operates inside the head of the person making the call, and it works precisely because it cannot be delegated. It is the reason someone pauses before pushing past a guardrail, escalates the awkward case rather than clearing it, and writes down the reasoning they would rather not have to defend later.

An AI-enabled process reproduces none of that. As policy, assessment, recommendation and outcome migrate into systems that nobody in the room fully understands, there may cease to be an individual who genuinely made the decision at all. Responsibility does not vanish so much as diffuse: the vendor points to the deployment, the agency points to the model, the executive points to the framework, and the person affected by the decision finds there is nobody at the other end of it.

We have answered this with the language of "human oversight" and "human accountability", which mostly means writing a name at the top of a process that the named person could not reconstruct, would not have reversed and did not really make. That is an org chart, not accountability, and everyone involved knows the difference.

Accountability only exists where a specific person knows, before the decision is taken, that they will be the one fronting up if it goes wrong, and where they hold enough authority to stop the thing they are answerable for. Anything less is a signature on someone else's judgement.

So the question worth asking of every AI deployment in the public sector is not whether a human is in the loop, but who does the perp walk. If the honest answer is nobody, the system is not ready to be used on citizens, however good its accuracy figures look.