Some of the country’s most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of an artificial intelligence tool that can do 81 years of detective work in just 30 hours.
Avon and Somerset Police are trialling the technology which can identify potential leads that may not have been found during a manual trawl of the evidence.
The Soze tool – developed in Australia – can analyse video footage, financial transactions, social media, emails and other documents simultaneously.
An evaluation showed it was able to review the evidential material in 27 complex cases in just 30 hours – which it is estimated would have taken up to 81 years for a human to do.
Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said the technology could be used to help close some of the country’s oldest and most notorious unsolved cases.
“I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews,” he told reporters.
“You might have a cold case review that just looks impossible because of the amount of material there and feed it into a system like this which can just ingest it, then give you an assessment of it. I can see that being really, really helpful.”
It comes after Sky News reported fewer police officers from the UK’s largest force are working on unsolved murder cases, while last week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described his force as “dangerously stretched”.
Five Met officers are moving from a specialist cold case department investigating the 30-year-old murder of Atek Hussain to bolster basic command units.
Mr Hussain, 32, was stabbed in the heart as he returned from work in September 1994. He managed to stagger to his home and tell his family that his attackers were Asian before collapsing.
The Met said the case is not currently active, but no unsolved murder investigation is ever closed and Mr Hussain’s case was last reviewed by its Serious Crime Review Group in August.
Mr Stephens said the Soze tool is one of “dozens of ground-breaking programs” which could soon be rolled out across the UK.
They include an AI tool to build a national database of knives, which could be used to put pressure on retailers, and a system that allows call handlers to focus their attention on speaking to domestic abuse victims.
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“If all of those 64 examples were adopted all across England and Wales and had similar gains to those of the forces using them, we’d get something like 15 million hours of productivity back to spend on things like investigations or responding to emergencies, which equates to more than £350m in costs,” the chief constable said.
But he said AI and other technology such as facial recognition and robotic automation procedures are “not a replacement” for police, with an officer “involved in the final decisions”.
Police chiefs also recognise the pace of its implementation and use must be in line with what the public is comfortable with.
“This isn’t handing over our responsibilities to technology but what the technology is helping us to do better,” said Mr Stephens.