Police to trial AI in a bid to help solve Britain’s most complex cold cases
24 September 2024, 09:17 | Updated: 24 September 2024, 10:08
Some of Britain’s most infamous cold cases could be solved by artificial intelligence after a trial found it could review evidence at a far greater speed than its human counterparts.
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Police chiefs hope AI could be used in the future to take in heaps of data and provide new lines of inquiry for human officers.
A trial by Avon and Somerset Police, using an Australian-developed AI tool called Söze, found the software can process the amount of evidence it would take humans 81 years to study in just two days.
The trial saw Söze study 27 complex cases, with results showing it could process all the evidence in 30 hours.
A more comprehensive trial is now planned to prove the software can be used on a wider scale.
Chairman of the National Police Chiefs Council Gavin Stephens said the tech would be “really useful” in providing new lines of inquiry for cold cases.
He said: “So you might have had a cold case review, possible cost, the amount of material there, and if there’s a system like this, they can just ingest it and give you an assessment of it then I can see that being really, really, really helpful some of the most notorious unsolved crimes out there.”
The Söze website claims it “allows investigators and analysts to discover patterns across disparate data sets at a level of analysis that is not possible using current methods.”
The software can also allegedly seamlessly analyse:
- Video footage
- Financial transactions
- Call charge records
- Social media
- Emails
- Images
- Mobile phones
- Computer hard drives, and
- Documents.
Last year it was revealed one police force has worked its way through ‘65 years of data in just six months’ thanks to advances in artificial intelligence.
Speaking to LBC, Paul Taylor said the technology - which is being discussed at a safety summit this week - is already working the equivalent shifts of 600 officers every year.
"All forces are benefiting from AI already, it’s integrated into systems around unmanned vehicles and drones and in language translation for rapid crisis situations,” he said.
“We’re using AI in facial recognition technology, identifying hundreds of offenders every month.
"It’s looking through hundreds of thousands of images to identify illegal child pornography material. Historically our teams would have had to look at that material manually, now we’re able to use artificial intelligence to find those explicit and horrible images.
“That not only speeds up the investigation, it also means our workforce is not having to look at lots of that material - which is important.
“Of course, in every call it’s a human making the final decision but what the AI is doing is helping those humans complete their tasks in a rapid manner.”
