Avon and Somerset Police, operating in the south of England, have recently trialled a new AI system, with surprising results.
Hailing the Australian Soze AI tool as “really, really helpful,” Gavin Stephens – chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council in the UK – was impressed by the pilot.
Used to trawl through hours and hours of footage and documents – including CCTV, financial transactions, and social media – without needing a break, the AI tool has been cutting processing time significantly.
The results suggest that it could process 27 complex cases – estimated at 81 years’ worth of work for a human police officer – in just 30 hours.
It’s no wonder that police chiefs are excited.
In an interview with Sky News, Stephens explained how AI could be used in the future to solve cold cases to which human officers didn’t have the capacity to work on:
“I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews. 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.”
The significant attention to detail that an AI tool can be trained to have means that details that human officers might miss during a mammoth trawl through evidence could be identified, meaning that potential leads in even decades old unsolved cases might be found.
And Soze is not the only AI technology being adopted by police in the UK, with facial recognition technology already in operation, and a national database on knives and weapons coming soon.
In addition, technology to streamline emergency service call systems, so that operators can prioritise urgent cases and supporting victims of crime such as domestic abuse, will soon be rolled out among plenty of other AI options, as Stephens explained to Sky News:
“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.”
Though the AI tool could help to address the UK’s significant issues in tight budgets and understaffing amongst the police force, Mr Stephens notes that they will not be a complete substitute for human police officers who will be involved in following up the leads that AI identifies.
So while Soze and other programs could be working hard behind the scenes, you can rest assured that you won’t be arrested by an AI police officer any time soon.
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