Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement

August 9, 2018 Crime , OTHER , Security , Technology

AFP photo

By

Ricardo Swire

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionized technology that helps humans become more efficient. AI is both a driver and consequence of structural forces reshaping the global order. Since 2004 forward-thinking industries incorporated such systems, national security robots, engineered to detect and deactivate bombs, being the norm in several international countries. From 2010 to 2016 700 US military robots collectively worth US$55.2 million were sold to domestic law enforcement via a special US government agreement with Black-I Robotics.

The Dallas Police Department made history when officers used a robot to eliminate an active shooter threat. Social media’s increased drug dealing has compelled New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives to monitor innovative Instagram networks such as “Tinder.” The cyber platform offers buyers and sellers deals in nearby drug markets.

NYPD officers are aided by the state Attorney-General Office’s innovative algorithm program. The AG’s cyber process uses a dictionary of drug dealing hashtags, such as #Weed4Sale commonly used to retail marijuana. AI “Classifiers” or image and text separators are programmed to filter drug-related posts. Millions of Instagram postings are scrutinized, drug dealers spotlighted and human law enforcers notified of their identities.

In the Netherlands internal security officials use a “chatbot” interviewer called “Brad.” The AI technology is calibrated to recognize deception via physiological cues and machine learnt algorithms.

Individuals feed AI’s expanding force every minute. Daily Google, Twitter, Baidu, Weibo, Facebook, Tencent, Amazon and Alibaba interactions contribute to no less than 2.2 billion gigabytes of data generated worldwide. Such information is harvested by high-tech security operations that train algorithms to anticipate and mimic human behavior. The more users who engage such cyber platforms the more data collected.

In today’s global race for AI supremacy America and China gallop strongly out front. The US leads in hardware, semi-conductor development and the dynamic commercial AI sector. China’s massive population provides access to the largest data mining pool. In 2016 Chinese officials were stunned when American Goggle DeepMind’s “AlphaGo” defeated their “Go” world champion. Go is a prestigious ancient Chinese strategy game.

Generally, national security and law enforcement agencies utilize enterprise data strategies that allow the integration of hundreds of different databases and sources. AI’s infrastructure is modernized with new architecture and hardware that generate “cyber tips.” The ability to decipher counter-intelligence and identify red flags within images is accelerated. IP addresses, phone numbers and text can be utilized to ascertain the physical location of suspects or threats.

Faces are a unique identifying feature. Since 2017 BrainChip Studio provided intelligence and law enforcement agencies with AI software that includes advanced facial detection, extraction and classification algorithms. The spiking neural network technology enables low resolution video, with only a twenty-four by twenty-four pixel image, to detect and classify faces. During a real-time field trial the AI software detected, extracted and classified more than five hundred thousand facial images, from three and a half hours of video, across eight different cameras.