Robots? It may sound like a scene from a science fiction movie. However, there has been an on-going thought that if you can predict something happening then you can prevent it. So, with the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, crime prevention is a huge industry that will gain benefits from this new era of technology.
Many businesses and cities all over the world are investing in AI for crime prevention and detection. Businesses are constantly experimenting with new ways to use AI for better risk management and faster, more responsive fraud detection. By using huge volumes of data to find behavioural patterns in people can be the building blocks for crime prevention.
Given the wealth of data available today, and the rising expectations of customers and public authorises, AI has and will continue to open many doors in predicting crimes and preventing them from happening. Not only that, AI can also help build up behaviour patterns, rather than rely on potentially biased historic data.
AI and ethics
Predictive policing, for example, tends to rely on records of crime reported by the community or from police patrols, which can lead to feedback loops and greater enforcement in communities that are already heavily policed. There are also concerns around accuracy, given reports that the Met’s automated facial recognition technology has a 98% false positive rate. Therefore, we must be careful that police resources are used for actual threats, rather than perceived ones.
Real-time crime prevention
Many organisations across the world are moving toward more data-driven approaches to solving crimes. Machine learning is particularly skilled ay identifying patterns and can be quite useful when trying to discern an M.O. of an offender. Digital tools like Chris Butler Associates’ SCIMON can speed up this work and find connections that might take humans much longer to uncover.
By using CCTV data, SCIMON can track and monitor even one of the largest cities in the world in minutes. By being able to watch out for behavioural patterns it can spot the likes of cars being stolen, moped snatches and more.
‘Our AI and Deep Machine Learning solutions scale and process in real-time. SCIMON will dynamically grow from monitoring a few CCTV cameras to thousands with no human input needed. We can already detect a vast array of ‘objects’, from people to cars to rucksacks and weapons. Not only can we identify ‘things’ we can work out what those things are doing. For example, car accidents, hostile reconnaissance, fights, and robberies. We monitor these across live CCTV in broad city-scapes and can also use both historic CCTV and probabilistic inference to fill in the gaps,’ said, Chris Butler Founder of Chris Butler Associates.
SCIMON can detect moped crime as they occur and can alert the nearest police officer to the location, all in a matter of seconds. SCIMON can then track the whereabouts of the moped and alert officials throughout this process.
In the future, these types of behavioural technology will prove useful to detect serial crimes committed by the same individual or group of people.
As with any adoption of new technology, there are questions to ask and concerns to address. Law enforcement agencies across the world are grappling with these and trying to find the right balance to take advantage of the benefits of this technology to fight and solve crime while preserving privacy and security.