London Thanasis Gavos

The wider use of Artificial Intelligence systems to solve crimes is being considered by the British police.

According to the head of the National Council of Chief Police Officers, Gavin Stevens, police departments across the country already use 64 innovative AI and data science systems to assist police investigation.

He noted that if all police departments in England and Wales used all 64 of these methods, then the force as a whole would save 15 million hours of productive time and at least £350 million in costs.

Mr Stevens referred, among other things, to an artificial intelligence system developed for London’s Metropolitan Police by the University of Surrey, which allows knives used in crimes to be quickly identified, such as when and where they were bought.

The most interesting innovation, however, was the Söze Artificial Intelligence software, which resides on remote servers (cloud-based) and has the ability to analyze evidence of difficult cases by finding connections between suspects, examining calls, messages and documents and indicating lines of inquiry.

The software, described as a digital police investigation tool, was developed by a company in Australia and was used on a pilot basis by England’s Avon and Somerset Police Directorate on 27 unsolved cases over a six-week period.

The results showed that the body was able to complete the structuring and analysis of the available data in just one day, six hours, five minutes and 55 seconds. The same task if done manually would theoretically require 81 years!

“I could imagine this kind of tool being really useful in case reviews (…), some of the most famous unsolved crimes out there,” commented Mr. Stevens.

The Australian manufacturers state that Söze “has successfully demonstrated» that crimes of terrorism, organized crime, trafficking in white flesh, homicide, fraud and exploitation of minors can be solved with the use of Artificial Intelligence.

The name of the software is the surname of Kaiser Soze, the criminal genius embodied by Kevin Spacey in the movie “Usual Suspects» in 1995.