In a world of misinformation and oversharing, it appears AI has become a somewhat scary prospect to many. When you think or hear of AI, it evokes very strong emotions in us all. Depending on your perspective, it can be very exciting or quite alarming.
What’s not always clear is that there is a whole host of every-day things we interact with that are powered by AI. They are often quite mundane tasks, such as deciphering the washing labels on clothes, but they’re extremely beneficial to our everyday lives.
An imperative, and often overlooked, way that AI is having significant impact on our society is by aiding our police forces. Enforcing public safety is one of the most important aspects of our society, and adopting greater use of AI empowers police officers to focus on what’s important – the safety and security of our communities.
Embracing AI for increased efficiency
The use of AI in policing is proving to be both timesaving and value-adding. At Altia, we’ve witnessed two recent uses of AI growing in popularity with the UK’s police forces: generative AI and deep learning.
These technologies are incredibly powerful when it comes to interpreting large data sets, which is hugely beneficial to police officers across the UK.
For them, this technology is the difference between laborious manual data entry and analysis, and streamlined, efficient operations. Using AI provides our police officers with much-needed time and human expertise, allowing them to work efficiently.
For example, AI is regularly used to transcribe interviews and analyse the resulting data.
Saving valuable time for real crime-solving
AI also facilitates entity matching, swiftly identifying individuals, locations and other pertinent details in vast datasets, thereby supercharging case management.
This intelligent use of AI moves extremely lengthy tasks away from our already time-strapped police forces, allowing them to shift their focus to more pressing issues related to solving crimes.
Another powerful capability of generative AI is summarisation. This involves the technology taking large amounts of textual data and summarising it quickly. This is already proving pivotal for the police, and is particularly crucial in live crime situations, where speed and accuracy are vital for success.
Without question, the importance of AI’s ability to find information, especially when it’s a needle in a haystack-type situation, cannot be overestimated. This, along with its power to provide links to the original source, is transformative.
As well as speeding up manual processes or finding new information, generative AI can capture and search sources too. This all reduces the administrative overhead of tracking and reporting on audit trails, freeing up precious time and resources for fighting the UK’s growing levels of crime.
The power of familiar interactions
The transformation of interaction techniques is an increasingly prevalent method of AI, and it’s beginning to pick up traction in the crime and security space. Natural language processing, also a component of generative AI, enables users to make inquiries of systems in a manner that feels intuitive and familiar.
For example, users can request, “list the top ten transactions in my bank statements”. This aligns with our natural preference as humans for conversational interactions. This has a strong relevance when speed is of the essence in live crime instances too, and with users who aren’t necessarily system experts. AI context and continued conversations have developed even further over the last 12 months, again improving interaction ease and familiarity.
Surviving AI development and implementation
The question during every stage of AI development and implementation is ‘how does it enhance what is already being done, and how can we make it trustworthy for users?’
Essentially, with the right trusted provider the right controls can be put in place and it’s clear AI can be safely applied to turbo charge the process of solving crimes, whether that’s providing more efficient information or simply generating it at a faster pace.
The journey of AI has just begun and it’s fantastic to see it yielding so many results for police forces up and down the UK already. When used correctly, AI will help us to build a safer, more secure and efficient future.
What’s more, this success can and will be replicated across industries. AI is set to be transformative for so many businesses, organisations and individuals – not just policing. Providing we have the right human guidance and control around it, we can use AI to make our world a safer, more efficient, more cost-effective place to be.
