As the population continues to grow exponentially, the rise in crime rates follows. Gone are the days when you could walk home alone and leave your cars unlocked. Not that I would ever consider leaving anything unlocked, especially living in Athens. Could AI potentially be the solution to the rise in crimes and lower human errors in criminal cases? The rise of artificial intelligence has changed the ways we live our everyday lives and made the jobs of humans easier. The development of AI software has proven the ability to support public security through facial recognition, video/photo analysis, processing DNA, and crime forecasting.
An AI application that is being used in both the public and private sectors is facial recognition and video analysis. Unlike humans who grow tired of looking at a screen for hours, computers can do it effortlessly forever. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s Janus computer-vision project has analysts performing trials on the use of algorithms that can learn how to distinguish one person from another using their facial features. This software could potentially be used to find criminals by their facial features from surveillance videos in areas where certain crimes were committed. Researchers in Malaysia are developing AI software for CCTV cameras in an effort to decrease the number of street crimes in the country. This software can autonomously detect these crimes by analyzing the footage in the security camera. The software would detect if there is a weapon or aggressive action and contact law enforcement if a suspected crime is committed. Although the research is still pretty new and in development, I believe it would save many lives as usually law enforcement doesn’t arrive until after the crime is committed.
AI also can forecast potential victims based on associations and behavior. This is called predictive analysis which is a complex process that uses large volumes of data to forecast and formulate potential outcomes. Cops and other enforcement officers are usually tasked with the job of surveying areas for crime but often miss out due to large crowds and bias. The elderly is a large group that is often targeted due to them being an easier target. NIJ-funded researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston are using AI algorithms to analyze elder victimization. The algorithms can pinpoint the victim, perpetrator, and environmental factors leading to the abuse.
Unfortunately, AI is developed by humans and inherits the bias and error of humans. All datasets inputted into these algorithms to generate results are human data and often contain human bias that leads to AI results. As previously discussed in class, we have seen this bias in Amazon as they created a system to hire based on resumes for potential candidates and the results showed a strong bias for men compared to women. This was because the data they imputed from the system was from past hires who happened to be routinely white males. The AI software for facial recognition could potentially be biased and target individuals for their race, ethnicity, and gender. Independent research studies have shown that AI can lead certain groups to be targeted over others and often stopped to be searched by law enforcement. Especially living in America, a very diverse country, I believe this AI software will increase discrimination in certain situations and lead to more unwarranted arrests. With more research and development, AI software will lead to less error and bias. Although it’s not perfect and foolproof, I believe in the coming years it will be beneficial to help reduce crime rates.
The future of AI is still in development, and we truly haven’t seen its true potential. Unlike humans, machine learning can learn from its mistakes and take the data to perform even better. Although error and bias are unavoidable in today’s society, the use of AI is taking the world by storm as we have it being used in the medical field such as radiology and now criminal justice. Today, I wouldn’t be comfortable walking outside or even walking to the nearest stoplight. Thousands of people fall victim to sexual abuse, human trafficking, robbery, and much more. The AI software that is being used in the criminal justice field is just the start and hopefully, one day will help to protect people from leaving their houses.
Sources:
https://www.aitimejournal.com/how-ai-technology-helps-solve-crime#:~:text=AI%20technology%20has%20become%20highly,improves%2C%20so%20does%20DNA%20processing.
Artificial intelligence in criminal justice: invasion or revolution?
From Homer's Iliad to 20th century science fiction movies, through Da Vinci's humanoid robot, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a subject of humankind's dreams for centuries. Although the notion of AI has started as a fantasy, sometimes even dystopian, like Spielberg's film Minority Report which depicts a worrying future of advanced technologies in law enforcement, AI is now a reality in daily life, and has shifted human lifestyles.
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I agree with you that AI could increase discrimination to certain populations of people. However, overall, I also think AI will be good to society by reducing crime rates. I still find it fasnicating that current crimes are unsolved even with the amount of technology available to citizens and law enforcement.
Hi Elaine, this was a very interesting read. I am very intrigued to learn about how AI is and will be used in the future in criminal justice. Like you said, the AI inherits the biases and errors from the data it is created from. I would lean towards suggesting or maybe should say I want to believe that AI will reveal more truth in terms of association and trends that could open the door for not only more effective solutions but also criminal justice reform.
This is a huge issue, and one of the classic ones associated with bias in ML. The challenge is that it’s not really clear whether ML is superior or not to the bias of human decision-makers. For instance, some research says defendants are most likely to get a longer sentence in decisions made right before lunch. That seems crazy (but completely believable) to me.
As much as the idea of AI in criminal justice seems like a good idea, I would be afraid that the bias of AI could get in the way of being a fair and accurate way of stopping crime, especially when you add in the predicative element. This feels like the AI, which is driven off past data, saying people who have committed crimes in the past are probably more likely to commit them again, which is probably true statistically. I feel as if this could lead to negative consequences for minor crimes and also potentially be bad at analyzing one off crimes.
Hey Elaine! This is a very interesting post. I strongly believe that AI would be a great “back-up” plan to help resolve/reduce crimes. I say this because there might be a malfunction in AI, and it could detect a “false” crime on someone. I definitely see any type of authority using this technology as a back-up to help their investigations.
Hi Elaine great post! I think using AI to find criminals is a great idea but could not be relied on 100%. As you and the previous comments have mentioned, bias would be a major issue in relying on technology to incarcerate people, especially because we cannot explain how the AI got to its decision thus making the decision extremely debatable. I do think if this form of AI was advanced enough, it could be very helpful in specific cases. For example, if it was able to identify wanted criminals from cameras or report suspicious activity in high security areas like airports or government buildings. It also makes me think about how difficult it is to search through thousands of minutes of recordings and pictures when looking for evidence. I remember hearing that when the Boston Marathon bombing happened, the police asked everyone that was present on that day to send in any videos or pictures they took. In a situation like this, AI could have helped the police sort through those images to find evidence much faster.
Hey Elaine, exciting topic! I think AI would be an incredible tool and work best in a criminal justice application when it is specifically utilized as a complementary tool instead of to derive conclusions. AI is great at finding patterns that could lend useful in facial recognition in cameras. Overall, the use of AI in criminal justice has the potential to increase efficiency and fairness. However, it is essential to ensure that appropriate safeguards accompany the use of this AI to prevent misuse of the technology.
Hey Elaine! Great read. Seeing you talk about software detecting and alarming law enforcement if a suspected crime is committed immediately reminded me of the movie Minority Report. I see the film is referenced in your source too, “Artificial intelligence in criminal justice: invasion or revolution?”, and I definitely recommend watching the movie if you have not yet! It’s a little dated (came out in 2002) but it is exactly what you’ve talked about here in your blog post. It’s a police unit that arrests murderers before the crime takes place. In the film they use precogs (humans that provide names for the unit) but in our situation this would be AI. It’s definitely interesting to see this idea come into fruition. Just not sure if I agree with the idea of this coming to life, as we see with the discrimination being present.
Hi Elaine! Great post. I liked how you mentioned both the benefits and issues that could be associated with using AI for criminal justice. I think that there could be so many errors with the AI, especially depending on the surveillance and how it predicts who was involved in the crime. One thing I think AI would be better at in terms of criminal justice would be focusing on cold cases. If a crime were committed years ago and it was still unsolved, it would be very helpful if AI could try to predict the faces of how the people have aged over time and even be able to work with some of the data that is already existing. This was a really interesting post!
Hi Elaine!! This was really interesting to read and provoked a lot of thought for me about what it could mean going forward as we see AI brought into more and more areas of our lives – like you said in Amazon hiring and now, maybe criminal justice. For me, it brought up a thought that in some ways maybe AI is revealing our own subconscious discrimination- particularly in the Amazon case and with other variables such as reoffending rates. It brings up the challenge of both checking ourselves for any subconscious biases and also trying to train an AI to be unbias even though all of us, the people training it, are biased in some ways. Maybe, as others have said, we will see AI in more of a supportive role such as aging faces or identifying individuals in crowds, and less determinative roles such as justice and decision-making.
Super interesting topic Elaine! I could see certain certain elements of AI implemented in the long term. The idea of using facial recognition could be very valuable in identifying suspects through camera footage, but other ideas such as basing the entire trust in the AI system would cause a lot of problems as there could be many errors in this process. It will be interesting to see how this is permanently implemented for worldwide use.