Suggesting that budget cuts have rendered mere human police incapable of doing their jobs without cybernetic help, project lead Iain Donnelly claims working with an AI system will allow the force to do more with less. He insists that the National Data Analytics Solution, as it\u2019s called, will target only those individuals already known to have criminal tendencies, sniffing out likely offenders to divert them with therapeutic \u201cinterventions<\/em>,\u201d including individuals who are stopped and searched but never arrested or charged.<\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n Donnelly claims the program is not designed to \u201cpre-emptively arrest<\/em>\u201d anyone, but to provide \u201csupport from local health or social workers<\/em>,\u201d giving the example of an individual with a history of mental health problems being flagged as a likely violent offender,\u00a0then contacted by social services. Given that a violent mental case would almost certainly react negatively to being contacted out of nowhere by a mysterious social worker \u2013 and that a history of mental health problems is not in itself criminal \u2013 Donnelly was wise to end his example there.<\/p>\n \u201cInterventions<\/em>\u201d will be offered\u00a0only to potential offenders, but\u00a0the NDAS\u00a0claims to be able to pick their victims as well. It combines statistics from multiple agencies with AI machine learning to assess an individual\u2019s risk of committing or being victimized by gun or knife crime, or \u201cfalling victim to modern slavery<\/em>,\u201d according<\/a> to documents<\/a> obtained by the New Scientist.\u00a0<\/p>\n The NDAS isolated almost 1,400 \u201cindicators<\/em>\u201d of future criminality in a population sample of five million, analyzing\u00a0more than a terabyte\u2019s worth of data from local and national police databases, and zeroed in on 30 particularly effective markers, including the number of crimes committed by people in one\u2019s social group, the number of crimes committed \u201cwith the help of others<\/em>,\u201d and an individual\u2019s age at first offense. This data was then used to predict when an individual already known to the police was planning to re-offend, and assigned a \u201crisk score<\/em>\u201d accordingly.<\/p>\n West Midlands Police hope to begin generating predictions with the NDAS in early 2019, working hand-in-glove with the Information Commissioner\u2019s Office to ensure privacy regulations are “respected<\/em>.” The program\u2019s designers hope to see it adopted throughout the UK; London\u2019s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police are also reportedly on board.<\/p>\n
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