Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Fight Crime

October 4, 2019 – Please welcome Gaurav Belani, senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely a content marketing agency specializing in data-driven SEO. Belani has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing. His interests include artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data science, and other emerging technologies. Connect with him on Twitter @belanigaurav. 

In this guest posting, Gaurav describes the state of crime around the world providing statistics on different types of crime and rates in a number of countries. He then begins to show where AI is being leveraged today for crime prevention. As always feel free to write your comments or send questions to this website.

It is terrifying to look at crime statistics not to mention the cost incurred. In the United States alone, crime control contributes up to 2% of GDP. 

Here are some of those worrying numbers:

• As per the World Population Review, Venezuela has the highest crime rate at 84.86 per 100,000 population in 2019.
• The crime rate in the United States in comparison is 46.73. An interesting statistic shows that the U.S. has the highest rate of car theft on the planet with 765,500 reported in 2016, 41.37 % of the world total.
• Alaska recorded the highest rate of gun crimes and deaths in 2017 at 24.5 per 100,000, while Alabama saw 8.3 murders per 100,000 in the same year.
• The University of Maryland recently reported that cyber hacks were happening at a rate of one every 39 seconds. And in 2018, 78% of organizations stated they had been targeted by cyber attackers according to a recent report.

So how is AI being applied to help reduce and prevent some of these types of crimes?

1. Using Gunfire Detection to Protect Cities and Campuses

ShotSpotter is a company that offers a solution to detect gunfire incidents. Today 80% of gunshot incidents are unreported and even when someone calls 911, the information provided is often vague and inaccurate. But with ShotSpotter and smart city infrastructure, law enforcement can triangulate the location of a gunshot alerting operators in less than 60 seconds and offering information about the type of gunfire and the site. accurate to within 3 meters (10 feet). The system is being used in over 90 U.S. cities with Denver one of the most recent to adopt the technology.

2. Installing AI Security Cameras to Search for Potential Criminals 

AI security cameras can tell the difference between a human intruder and cat lurking in your backyard. Advanced security cameras even detect natural speech patterns and learn your schedule. Hangzhou, China-based Hikvision, has developed a security camera that claims to achieve 99% accuracy with its advanced visual analytics applications. Its cameras can scan for license plates on cars, recognize faces to search for potential criminals or missing persons, and detect suspicious anomalies such as unattended bags in crowded places. Today its cameras are used in more than 150 countries and regions including the U.S. and U.K.

3. AI Crime Prevention

According to a recent study conducted by the University of California, crimes carried out in a location tend to follow a similar pattern and can be predicted in the same way seismologists predict earthquake aftershocks. Predpol, a Santa Cruz, California company, is using AI to predict when and where crimes will happen. One of the early adopters, The Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division, reported a 20% drop in predicted crimes from January 2013 to January 2014 using the technology. The Santa Cruz Police Department saw assaults decline 9%, burglaries 11%, and robberies 27% in the first year of the applications use.

Cloudwalk Technology, a Chinese early startup based in Beijing, has developed facial recognition technology that is currently being used in the financial, public security, and aviation sectors. It features facial recognition terminals, facial scanning door entry, and infrared binocular scanning machines. It can be used to detect changes in a person’s behavior through subtle facial changes and movements. 

4. AI in Cybersecurity

Cyber attacks represent a significant risk to businesses and governments today. And it is mainly because cyber attackers have been using AI to launch their attacks, that law enforcement technology developers have adopted it to combat hacks. HackerU is a cybersecurity course to help analyze, understand, and prevent cybercrime.

A Capgemini report entitled “Reinventing Cybersecurity with Artificial Intelligence,” notes that 75% of surveyed executives stated that AI benefited their organizations by allowing them to respond faster to data breaches. In the same report, 69% cited that AI was an essential tool in responding to cyberattacks with three in five firms reporting that using AI had improved the accuracy and efficiency of their cyber analysts.

Winding Up 

When it comes to investigating crime, the details can make a difference. But what if you cannot separate the wheat from the chaff? That’s where AI can make an enormous difference, empowering law enforcement to speed up the processing of information and spot patterns that might remain hidden in the data. The evolving state of AI tools for fighting crime is not only available to police, but also to businesses, and individual homeowners who are only in recent years beginning to use the technology to stop criminals before they inflict damage. The future promise of these evolving technologies bodes well for crime prevention and detection, helping to drive down the statistics that appeared at the beginning of this posting.