UK police will make decisions about the detention of suspects using AI

Police in the English city of Durham are going to use a specialized cognitive system to help them make an important decision - whether the suspect should be detained or can be released on bail. The system, which was developed specifically for the police, was named the Hart (Harm Assessment Risk Tool). Hart will evaluate the suspects on a fairly simple risk system: low, moderate and high risk of committing crimes in the future.

The system itself is not yet fully utilized, the police are only testing some of its capabilities in order to see how effectively it can deal with criminals and crimes. If all goes well, it will be put into operation in the next few months. Hart can be used to solve other issues. For example, in order to determine the amount of time it takes to keep a suspect in custody, to determine whether to release him (or her) on bail, plus other important things.

Hart is based on the work of a neural network that was trained on data collected by the Durham police from 2008 to 2013. During the assessment, the service uses factors such as the crime history of a particular person, the severity of the crimes committed, and calculates the likelihood that the suspect may hide.
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The system has been developed for several years, the first tests were conducted in 2013. Before starting work on the project, its authors investigated the behavior of criminals for two years. After that, the data were entered into the memory of a computer system, which was engaged in the analysis of information and predictions on the further behavior of the suspects. At the same time, the forecasts were quite accurate. Hart practically made no mistake, giving a minimum rating of the threat (accuracy 98%) and only slightly mistaken, giving its maximum rating (88%).

Currently, police from different countries are trying to use the latest technology for both the investigation of crimes and for their prevention. However, in some cases it is difficult to give an assessment to the arrested crime suspects. In addition, the study of the past of people who fell into the hands of the police, takes time, and a lot. But the computer is able to obtain the necessary data in a few seconds or minutes, immediately engaged in predicting the behavior of the suspect.

With the work of Hart, everything is fine, but, as it turned out , the software used by the police officers in the English city is very leaky. This applies not only to the software platform mentioned, but also to other software and hardware monitoring and analysis tools used by the police. Developers who are involved in creating software platforms for law enforcement officers are primarily interested in their proper and reliable work, and then in protection from external influences. Perhaps that is why police software is so poorly protected.

Of course, other cognitive systems that are now working for the benefit of various commercial companies, including Google, are also at risk. Similar software uses Facebook, Microsoft, Google. To bypass protection and gain access to closed data companies, you need to be not just a computer genius, but also a lucky genius.

With police systems, things are a little easier. Understanding the problem, law enforcement officers decided to ensure the security of national data, limiting access to the neural network only to the database of criminals and Durham crimes. In addition, the software platform will receive additional data from the network this year, and not from external sources. Network security experts believe that the company did the right thing, because attackers, if desired, will be able to obtain the necessary data within a couple of minutes.



At first, the system’s solutions are carefully studied by people to understand how adequate these solutions are. In the future, the robot will analyze the data received, yes, but people will check all the decisions, referring to the real state of affairs.

While the system is not "brought to mind", you should not trust it. After all, she, by mistake, will be able to release the offender. So it remains to wait until the support team finalizes the system. In the meantime, a cognitive platform for analyzing the behavior of crime suspects will serve as an auxiliary tool for Durham police officers. By the way, due to the fact that the platform is “sharpened” under a single region, and trained the system based on data on the crimes of the same area, Hart is not able to analyze suspects in crimes from other places.

However, if the system shows itself well, then it can later be connected to other police databases in various regions of the UK.