AI tool that can do ’81 years of detective work in 30 hours’ trialled by police

*Some of the country’s most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of an artificial intelligence tool that can do 81 years of detective work in just 30 hours.*

*Avon and Somerset Police are trialling the technology which can identify potential leads that may not have been found during a manual trawl of the evidence.*

*The Soze tool – developed in Australia – can analyse video footage, financial transactions, social media, emails and other documents simultaneously.*

*An evaluation showed it was able to review the evidential material in 27 complex cases in just 30 hours – which it is estimated would have taken up to 81 years for a human to do.*

*Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said the technology could be used to help close some of the country’s oldest and most notorious unsolved cases.*

*”I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews,” he told reporters.*

*”You might have a cold case review that just looks impossible because of the amount of material there and feed it into a system like this which can just ingest it, then give you an assessment of it. I can see that being really, really helpful.”*

*It comes after Sky News reported fewer police officers from the UK’s largest force are working on unsolved murder cases, while last week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described his force as “dangerously stretched”.*

*Five Met officers are moving from a specialist cold case department investigating the 30-year-old murder of Atek Hussain to bolster basic command units.*

*Mr Hussain, 32, was stabbed in the heart as he returned from work in September 1994. He managed to stagger to his home and tell his family that his attackers were Asian before collapsing.*

*The Met said the case is not currently active, but no unsolved murder investigation is ever closed and Mr Hussain’s case was last reviewed by its Serious Crime Review Group in August.*

*Mr Stephens said the Soze tool is one of “dozens of ground-breaking programs” which could soon be rolled out across the UK.*

*They include an AI tool to build a national database of knives, which could be used to put pressure on retailers, and a system that allows call handlers to focus their attention on speaking to domestic abuse victims.*

*”If all of those 64 examples were adopted all across England and Wales and had similar gains to those of the forces using them, we’d get something like 15 million hours of productivity back to spend on things like investigations or responding to emergencies, which equates to more than £350m in costs,” the chief constable said.*

*But he said AI and other technology such as facial recognition and robotic automation procedures are “not a replacement” for police, with an officer “involved in the final decisions”.*

*Police chiefs also recognise the pace of its implementation and use must be in line with what the public is comfortable with.*

*”This isn’t handing over our responsibilities to technology but what the technology is helping us to do better,” said Mr Stephens.*

This feels almost like a poster child for the perfect use case of AI.

No finding patterns in random noise to convict people on balance of probabilities – just instead performing the work that would have been done anyway if resources were available.

I know this will be downvoted unless I provide a cynical viewpoint so… maybe this will be bad for cute donkeys somehow?

Data analysis tools have been around and have been used by Policing, defense and security for years. I work in Policing IT and do a lot with AI. Its not about replacing the human, its about doing all the leg work faster than a human and presenting the skilled investigator with results, data and sources for them to make an judgement calls. Humans just can’t process the vast quantities of data that all investigations produce these days.

Its not about AI doing the investigations, its about speeding up informed decision making process of the officer.

that’s crazy because most police in this country seem to take 81 years to do about 30 hours work.

Greater Manchester Police absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to have three times the amount of evidence to be ignored during their investigations.

I’m sure this will have no downsides whatsoever. Given the deeply flawed nature of our “justice” system and it’s corruption.

I was hoping this was coming. All those horrific cold case murders might get solved eventually now.

AI can’t tell you how many R’s in strawberry. Now we’re going to use it to solve crime. Seriously try it.

There’s pros and cons to anything like this.

On the positive, it means there _may_ be better progress on some cases, which is a positive move given the shortage of resources the Police have had for quite some time.

On the downswing though – this will _still_ require human involvement and will have to be churned through by Police staff still.

It’s very one step foreward, another back – it may well mean that what staff have to go through is going to have more likelihood of positive outcomes, but is no guarantee and even with more potential leads doesn’t guarantee anything.

Ultimately it still falls back on the same problem we’ve had for many years: Police need more staff, which means the job needs to be attractive and also receive necessary support. You can’t tell me it isn’t going to rile that there’s a willingness to chuck money at a tool like this but not at getting more boots out there, either.

If this is successful let’s say , I wonder what will happen about those gritty police dramas that’s ITV keep churning every month with those tough as nails detectives

This is an incredibly stupid idea.

And I say that as someone who sells AI platforms.

Current “AI” Is neither capable or transparent enough to make _any_ critical decisions.

What’s the point in making the police faster at solving cases if the courts and prisons are the bottle neck. We need to solve that, obviously an AI prison and AI judges are the answer /s.

It must be explainable. The issue with AI is often that it goes into a black box that ultimately is very very hard to unravel. If i was a defence lawyer I’d be pulling it apart unless it was very clear.