Daily Management Review

UK Scotland Yard employs AI to deal with frauds


09/06/2019


The British police is using artificial intelligence (AI) in the investigation of crimes. The technology helps the police to process huge amounts of data that would take a person months to study. Nevertheless, the process still takes too much time: introduction of advanced technology is not cheap, and the government is not going to allocate money to expand the program yet.



Terry
Terry
There is a special laboratory in Scotland Yard in which police officers hack into mobile phones, laptops, game consoles, and even multimedia car systems in the hope of finding clues that would help them solve another case. The key to the solution can be any device connected to the Internet. More than 150 employees daily study thousands of pages of digital text and video materials that are viewed frame by frame. Such work is very expensive for the budget. And the key factor in this search is always time, which is often not enough.

In just the past two years, two rape cases in London were closed simply because key clues in the phones of the alleged perpetrators were found too late, writes the Financial Times.

The standard procedure for extracting data from a mobile device takes from five to seven hours, and a police officer must be present in this process. After that, the search for evidence begins directly.

Artificial intelligence is used by the police to search for the right information among thousands of documents. The technology can help solve even complex corruption cases in a timely manner. A vivid example of this is the anti-corruption investigation against Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc, which was carried out by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the UK.

The AI created by Ravn developers helped a seven-person SFO investigator team. The robot studied 30 million documents, looking at 600 thousand different files per day. It took him only five days to complete the process. In manual mode, this work would take several months.

But there is one problem on the way of the widespread introduction of AI into the work of the police: it is very expensive. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intends to raise the budget of the police to hire another 20 thousand officers throughout the country. According to the acting head of the laboratory for the search for digital evidence, in its current state, a laboratory of 160 employees will not be able to serve the needs of 28 thousand police officers. But there is no talk of increasing the budget for the laboratory yet.

source: ft.com