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

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

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.

9 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 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.

  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. 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.]
  6. 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.