28 Oct AI will reduce crime stats by 2023

Data exists to predict, and so prevent, crime, it’s just not yet being analysed, according to Warren Myers, CEO and Co-founder of AURA, security and medical response marketplace.

But in the near-future AI could be deployed to help fight crime. Said Myers: “There is a wealth of information to predict the likelihood of crime. It spans from the obvious indicators – like a person’s presence in a bad part of town – to the surprising, which includes weather patterns and the days of the week.”

Collating all of this data and combining it with past crime statistics, information from tipping lines, social media scraping and CCTV could help predict criminal activity and ensure that emergency services are proactively dispatched before anything happens.

A Finnish study revealed that a one degree increase in temperature results in a 1.7% increase in criminal activity, while a US study found that vehicle theft spiked on weekends and evenings.

“The principle can be used to predict spikes in traffic accidents and dispatch emergency services to nearby locations for even faster response times,” said Myers. “The artificial intelligence employed is similar to Uber’s algorithms which predict when and where there will be a high probability of ride requests so they can dispatch drivers proactively.”

Data engineers at AURA are already working on expanding its existing security and medical response algorithms, to become the central repository for risk data. It intends to employ hundreds of informants to operate on the ground and send information to the repository.

Myers explained: “Augmented with pools of data collected from available and existing sources, this information feeds into a so-called data lake, where AI is applied to create the intelligence that can predict crime and other emergencies.”