How AI and automation are delivering real world improvements in efficiency and effectiveness
Just reading the words “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation in Policing” is enough to make many of us recoil and immediately brings to mind some kind of futuristic dystopia, conjuring up images from movies such as Judge Dredd, Minority Report or The Terminator. But rather than AI super-brains predicting the future with sentences handed out before crimes have even been committed or rampaging robots enforcing the law without human intervention, I’m afraid (or perhaps relieved) that the use of AI and automation in policing, and in the wider justice system, is set to be much more mundane.
At a time when police officer and civilian support resources’ time is being so stretched by the proliferation of new types of digital evidence, all of which needs to be reviewed and analysed in everything from online fraud to rape cases, it may be that new technology is itself is able to solve some of the problems that other new technologies have caused.
Whilst many forces are straining under the weight of growing caseloads for case-types with heavy digital evidence requirements, after a decade of funding cuts and reductions in officer numbers, it is understandable that they and the government now see the answer as being more officers and more resources to trawl through this evidence and bring more prosecutions more quickly. But this approach reflects an old way of thinking and a paradigm shift is required here just as it is in other parts of government. Rather than deploying more humans to tackle increasing workloads and solve dramatically rising case backlogs, new cutting-edge technology should be deployed instead. And low-cost, Cloud-platform based AI and Automation technologies are at the heart of this.
Particularly when combined together AI and Automation technologies have the potential to transform policing. AI by examining digital evidence, spotting patterns, identifying previously unseen connections in data and excluding the huge volumes of irrelevant material. Automation by creating case files, gathering additional data from external sources, contacting witnesses and obtaining initial details, managing the process of sharing necessary information with prosecutors, defence and the courts and automatically moving the case forward through the multiple steps leading up to and beyond the transfer of the case to the CPS.
In so doing, lifting the administrative burden from police officers to do what they joined the police to do in the first place: policing, not paperwork.
Freeing them up to focus on the key and critical activities that only a highly trained, experienced human can do: keeping the public safe by applying and enforcing the law, through front-line policing, neighbourhood policing, apprehending suspects, conducting interviews, applying local knowledge and insights from experience to resolve cases, and presenting compelling evidence to secure convictions.
And the use of AI and Automation shouldn’t stop at the point the case file is handed off to the CPS; it also has a critical role to play in streamlining the courts process thereby helping to tackle the huge case backlogs that have built up in the criminal courts. One example of where this has already been done very effectively is in the US state of New Jersey court system which processes around 7 million cases per year. New Jersey decided to utilise process automation technology and artificial intelligence to help streamline how cases are brought to trial and processed. They have implemented a new ‘unified complaint entry’ system or ‘UCE’ (based on Pega’s low-code government platform technology) that enables police officers and courtroom staff to compile and manage cases within a single shared system. The system automatically manages each case through initial entry, generates the initial court date and then manages the entire lifecycle of the case. AI capability within the UCE system automates judicial administrative processes to manage the administration of a case in order to ensure the efficient and accurate flow of information to all parties.
What is striking about the New Jersey example is how fair but swift justice is being achieved without eye-wateringly high costs. Indeed New Jersey Court’s have estimated that the new process is 87% more efficient that that which it replaced and that the new simplified case processing has resulted in immediate savings of over $5m.
So, to conclude, it turns out that AI and automation in policing and justice isn’t just from a Hollywood vision of the future. It’s happening now and it’s delivering real world improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. With greater adoption it has the potential to tackle one of the biggest operational issues facing police forces today and to help to tackle backlogs throughout the justice system.
Author:
Alex Case, Senior Director, Industry Principal, EMEA Public Sector at Pegasystems Ltd.
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.