Artificial intelligence brings enormous potential to policing, with its ability to process large volumes of evidential data and assess for relevance in criminal investigations.
But alongside the benefits the technology is likely to bring, there are downsides. One area which could prove problematic in the not-too distant future, and arguably is already upon us, is the difficulty of understanding what is real, and what is not.
Harry Schone, data science and AI lead at Police Scotland, highlighted some of these challenges and opportunities for policing in an AI world at Futurescot’s Digital Justice & Policing conference in Glasgow in October.
He told an audience during a session on digital evidence and forensics, that the technology has significant advantages for helping investigating officers to search, categorise and assess for relevance data at scale.
“AI is increasing the speed at which digital evidence can be assessed and triaged,” said Schone, who is helping Police Scotland explore AI’s potential in supporting officers.
He was involved in a research project to look at the way AI could enable a better way of communicating key information to officers as they respond to emergency calls, especially in high-stress situations.
In digital forensics, Schone said that the central problem of sorting evidential data is “relevance” to the investigation, and AI can be useful in that context.
“So, for example, if you have a phone download, and youthousands or millions of pictures on that phone, and you identify an image of money, you want to be able to identify that image quickly, and you want to be able to work out quite rapidly if this is an image [involving] proceeds of crime. Is this relevant to the investigation or is it actually something more benign?” Schone said.
AI can also be used to structure information better and enhance the quality of evidence in certain scenarios, Schone said, including organising text into more searchable and structured formats, and using AI-enabled “denoising” tools to enhance video or image-based data.
Object recognition is another area where AI could be a powerful investigatory tool, with the technology trained to find weapons or vehicles, much quicker than it takes a human to manually search through large caches of data. Investigators need to be cautious, however.
Schone illustrated how defence lawyers successfully argued that AI technology had not only enhanced drone footage in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a man accused of shooting protestors in Wisconsin in 2021, but that it had added pixels to the image, thereby creating “new media”.
“It just gives you that indication of when we start bringing in slightly novel technologies, people will pick them apart, and we need to make sure that we can preserve that chain. It needs to be explainable,” said Schone.
Provenance is another key area when it comes to evidential data in criminal investigations.
“Is it real? Can I trust it? Is it a real person that’s been inserted into this image? Is this actually happening or not?” Schone asked.
As people increasingly converse with generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, that adds another layer of complexity when it comes to establishing search histories in criminal cases, and how you interpret these types of conversations, said Schone.
“So, whereas search history is quite established and relatively easy to interpret, lengthy conversations with large language models, where the large language model is coming back with suggestions, is perhaps guiding the conversations in certain ways, and that becomes much harder,” he added.
Given the rapid advances in deepfake technology, Schone said also that he would not be surprised in future if in some criminal cases the defendants were acquitted because they successfully were able to argue that a video or image purporting to be them was created using AI.
“There’s already been cases where people have tried this kind of deepfake defence, as it’s known,” said Schone. “And what that that basically means is you’re taking what used to be very gold standard evidence, a video of someone doing something criminal, that is no longer as good as it as it used to be.”
