AI could be used to solve Britain’s most notorious cold cases, police chief says

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Some of Britain’s most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of artificial intelligence after a trial found it can review evidence which would take 81 years of man-hours in less than two days.

Police chiefs hope the technology could be deployed in the future to simply ingest scores of case files to help identify new lines of inquiry for detectives.

A trial by Avon and Somerset Police, using an Australian-developed AI tool called Söze, tested the digital investigation platform on 27 complex cases.

The results showed it was able to review all the evidential material in 30 hours. It is estimated it would have taken up to 81 years for a human to manually review the same material.

The force is now set to run a more comprehensive trial to further test the benefits and develop the product for evidential use in UK policing.

Chairman of the National Police Chiefs Council Gavin Stephens believes the technology could be “really useful” for policing to tackle lengthy cold case reviews for notorious unsolved cases.

He said: “So you might have had a cold case review, possible cost, the amount of material there, and if there’s a system like this, they can just ingest it and give you an assessment of it then I can see that being really, really, really helpful some of the most notorious unsolved crimes out there.”

According to the platform’s website, the tool can seamlessly analyse video footage, financial transactions, call data, social media, emails, images, documents as well as phones and computer hard drives.

The chief constable insisted if AI is going to find its way into the evidential chain it will need to be carefully controlled and be used to support police work, rather than to replace it.

It is one of a string of new technologies which it is hoped will help to revolutionise policing.

Elsewhere, AI is being trialled to help the Metropolitan Police in a project with Surrey University to match blades to crimes and trace their origin.

The project, said to be the first of its kind in the world, acts like an AI catalogue of blade types to help police crackdown on knife crime by identifying weapons and their origins “virtually instantaneously”.

This helps the investigative process “immeasurably”, Stephens said, as officers can use the information to make links to other cases.

The projects come after Andy Marsh, the chief executive officer of the College of Policing, called for AI to be injected into police forces “like heroin into the bloodstream” to ease the paperwork burden for officers.

During a panel discussion at the Police Superintendents’ Association conference earlier this month, he revealed AI is already under trial to “effectively automate” police paperwork.

He hopes the technology can make the task of preparing prosecution case files a “problem of the past” in two years.