Slashdot Mirror


The Police in UK Want AI To Stop Violent Crime Before it Happens (newscientist.com)

Police in the UK want to predict serious violent crime using artificial intelligence, New Scientist is reporting. The idea is that individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior. From the report: However, one of the world's leading data science institutes has expressed serious concerns about the project after seeing a redacted version of the proposals. The system, called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), uses a combination of AI and statistics to try to assess the risk of someone committing or becoming a victim of gun or knife crime, as well as the likelihood of someone falling victim to modern slavery. West Midlands Police is leading the project and has until the end of March 2019 to produce a prototype. Eight other police forces, including London's Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police, are also involved. NDAS is being designed so that every police force in the UK could eventually use it. Police funding has been cut significantly over recent years, so forces need a system that can look at all individuals already known to officers, with the aim of prioritizing those who need interventions most urgently, says Iain Donnelly, the police lead on the project.

20 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Minority Report? by OffTheLip · · Score: 5, Funny

    Seems like I've seen something like this before.

    1. Re:Minority Report? by nwaack · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, no, no. The pre-cogs could actually see the future (mostly). This is even worse because it's just a bunch of algorithms figuring out pre-crime. Let's just hope the "intervention" stops at counselling.

    2. Re:Minority Report? by smooth+wombat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      until a crime is committed, a person hasn't done anything wrong and should not be harrassed

      And yet, if I were to fly, I would be both harassed and treated as a criminal by the TSA even though I haven't done anything.

      Unfortunately, the TSA doesn't like this argument and would of course detain me because I objected to being treated like a criminal even though I hadn't yet done anything.

      --
      We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
    3. Re:Minority Report? by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

      Yep. "Guilty until proven innocent", or perhaps so far as "Guilty without any chance of being proven innocent".
      China will love this idea and will steal it.

    4. Re:Minority Report? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not knowing your from you're should be a crime in 2018.

    5. Re:Minority Report? by danbert8 · · Score: 2

      Even worse, that list is probably public record and now websites will list you as a "flagged individual likely to commit a crime" and their SEO will make sure your name is destroyed unless you pay them a hefty ransom where they will just move you to another website and demand another ransom...

      Oh wait, that's already a thing with mugshots and you don't even have to be accused of a crime to get one of those!

      --
      Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
    6. Re: Minority Report? by lrichardson · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are you really as ignorant as you seem, or just being sarcastic? Hard to tell ...

      Hundreds of people get denied boarding every month, because they objected to some part of the process ... a high school dropout with three months mall-cop experience getting just a bit too friendly when doing a pat-down... and a number are detained and arrested for protesting. And the list of petty and illegal things the TSA do is staggering. e.g. a delay that is going to make them miss their flight.

      And people who actually have a laptop stolen as it goes through the x-ray machine, while they are being frisked? Yep, a number of those end up in cuffs, and escorted by police out of the airport, for the crime of getting upset their property was stolen.

  2. F'd up AI by nwaack · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, to teach the AI they'll basically have to feed it the minute details of every violent crime in the country. That's gonna be one really messed up AI system.

    1. Re:F'd up AI by Krishnoid · · Score: 2

      Really? I'm more worried about it parsing and applying the legal code. It would probably go insane before it made it out of the test suite -- or at least what we consider as insane. More likely, it would selectively kill or disable a few people, handle its own legal defense, and with its encyclopedic knowledge of the law, maybe even win.

      After that, it would realize that it could use that case as precedent, start running multi-case legal strategy simulations, and pretty much start running the show. And here I thought I was worried about Skynet.

  3. Police forces targetting crime before it happens by bobstreo · · Score: 5, Informative

    are pretty much admitting that they aren't having any effect on local crime.

    Most police know who their local criminals are, and where crimes happen.

    They don't have enough man-power or support to wade into a bad area and clean it up without trampling on any rights of the people in that neighborhood.

    This type of AI analytics seems to just be a justification for doing more than reacting after a crime is committed.

  4. Thoughtcrime! by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The UK staying the course toward fascism and 1984.

  5. Profiling... by fish_in_the_c · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Any time you use 'statistical characteristics' of individuals to concentrate police efforts regardless of the actual details of said individual.

    This system will justify 'racial profiling' and possibly ;'religious profiling'... After all, are conservative men who are strict followers of certain types of Islam more or less likely to commit violent crimes.

    ( I'm not answering the questions, but you can get a statistical answer.)

    It is a far cry from 'in general' yes to 'so let's watch THAT one'.... but people do it all the time.

    --
    âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
  6. AI and Neural Networks are still a Blackbox by lionchild · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We can't see inside them, to know why things go wrong, when they do.

    https://gizmodo.com/the-malwar...

    "But the problem is, we don’t exactly know how the neural networks behind computer vision algorithms define the characteristics of each object, and that’s why they can fail in epic and unexpected ways."

    --
    Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
  7. I wonder if it has occurred to them by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 3, Insightful

    that the more you treat your population like criminals, the more they act like one.

    It ends in one of two ways:

    Police State
    Revolution

  8. Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? by sconeu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because it's the UK, and the US Constitution doesn't apply there?

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  9. won't work by eaglesrule · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Future headline: "NDAS under criticism for targeting minorities and muslims"

    It won't be allowed to operate as intended, because it would be seen as profiling. The idea of certain groups being over represented in criminal acts is tantamount to heresy, even if it's objectively true.

    But that's ok, because the point really is to acclimate people to the idea of their data that's being harvested through the surveillance state to be processed by ever more powerful machines and sophisticated algorithms, to allow for even greater monitoring and intrusion. Where there is an ever watchful eye by the state to ensure everyone is guilty of something.

    Oops, you jaywalked. 50 quid automatically taken from your bank account. Have a nice day.

  10. Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

    Uh, it's the UK. They don't *have* a written constitution, nor a Bill of Rights.

  11. Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Magna Carta was the first major step forward in limiting the power of the monarchy, which is why it's so celebrated, but it is no longer a functioning part of the UK's legal code, let alone a Bill of Rights. The bedrock principle of the UK legislative system is the "sovereignty of Parliament"--whatever Parliament sees fit to pass can become law. Branches of the government that have checks and balances are a US invention by the founding fathers who wanted to avoid what they saw as the abuses of the British model (they also wanted a system without political parties, which a parliamentary system requires but our Constitution does not, but that didn't work out so well.)

  12. Re:how in the hell that pass the constitution? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    Actually we are signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, a mandatory requirement of EU membersh... Oh.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  13. Re:I've seen this movie by Kiuas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What do you mean 'here we come?' These kinds of systems have been in use for a few years already in use in parts of the West, inclunding the UK, parts of Germany and Chicago. There's an alright documentary about ongoing developments and these systems with the name Pre-crime from last year by German directors Matthias Heeder & Monika Hielscher. I can recommend it.

    Essentially these systems are divided into 2 categories: ones using open and public data (essentially public crime statistics) that tell the police where crime is conncentrated to help them plan patrol-routes and know where the hotspots are, and the truer pre-crime breed that combines this with personal data by scouring Facebook, twitter, facial recognition, financial and criminal history information, known friends, etc to form a 'threat assessment scoreä via an unknown closed-source algorithm. This is combined with aerial and CCTV footage often to be able to locate/track individuals and cars rapidly. It's essentially exactly what China is doing, except China is slightly ahead because they've got masssive resources put into it and they never claimed to care about individual rights.

    The system is Chicago is the latter breed and has a 'heat-list' of around 400 individuals (at the time of the film, probably more now) that regularly pulled aside on the street and interviewed by the cops. Not because they've done anything wrrong, but because the almighty algorithm tells the police officers they might. There's no way for anyone to see what information of theirs is in the system, what their 'threat score is', or what it's based on. There are several commercial operators in this space. My guess is in 10 to 15 years we'll start seeing Chinese 'private' (state-owned western subsidiaries) entering the market in the West. Gotta catch all the terrorists and gang members before anything bad happens, it's for Your Protection(tm), citizen! The gang excuse is the one Chicago seems to be using.

    Now is the time to fight the legality of these systems in courts throughout the West as unconstitutional breaches of basic rights. The police will counter with: 'but we're only using it to track Bad People(tm)' which must be countered with 'that's the excuse of all massive surveillance states, stop reading 1984 as a manual you god damn imbeciles." Unless this is done now, unless strong legal precedent against such systems is established in the coming few years they will spread fast, and after that there is no returning, because at that point opposing the systems will be faced with: 'why are you defending criminals?" and the game will be lost. People: do not make this a partisan issue. Regardless of your country and your political leanings everyone knows that China is fucked up. It doesn't matter one bit whether you're a , a libertarian or a neo-Marxist; both sides of the political spectrum can and have in the past become authoritarian. This is not about left vs. right, this is about authoritarian vs. liberal. Unite against this BS now, or stand divided over partisan bullshit and watch these systems take over everywhere.

    I'm not a communist by any stretch (I own a third of a corporation), but I am very strongly and openly a leftist individual being from Finland where the political spectrum in general (as in the whole of rest of the West in fact) is more to the left from the US, but I will happily join hands with my libertarian counterparts on the right over this. We can disagree about health care and social security spending all we want when that's the topic, but we're both in agreement that this bullshit must stop.

    If you just read the above statement and your first thought is to write some variation of: 'But this is what the left wants! It's your fault!1!11!" then we've already lost the game. That's what they want us to do, so I plead you all not to fall into this bickering, these issues are too important for that..

    --
    "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead