Law enforcement authorities in different countries use modern technologies that are put in the service of the law. Among other methods of work of modern police are DNA analysis of criminals, suspects and victims, digital databases of persons and fingerprints of tens of millions of people, analysis of the background noise of cities and other tricks.
Of course, video surveillance is among the police tools - there are more and more cameras in cities and towns of different countries. In some locations there are simply a huge number of them - both inside buildings and outside, on the streets. But cameras are not everything, they are not helping to catch the criminals, but the analysis of the data transmitted by them. The Wales Police, during the 2017 Champions League,
decided to use a digital perpetrator analysis system that worked almost in real time.
The idea is not bad, and most importantly - the results of such systems are quite good. One example is the identification and arrest of a criminal in a stadium of many thousands in China (see below for more on this). But in the case of Wales and his police, something went wrong. Many thousands of people's faces were analyzed using the latest image processing system. This system has identified more than 2,000 potential criminals and suspects. The images that were taken by the city’s cameras were compared to the base, when a large number of certain markers coincided, the picture was marked as “suspicious”.
In a football match, a game in which Real Madrid and Juventus took part, 170,000 people arrived in the capital of Wales. The digital system, which was discussed above, identified 2,470 coincidences with the base of criminals. But, as it turned out later, the accuracy of the system was extremely, incredibly low. Among 2,470 people, 2,297 were not implicated in any crimes. These were just false positives, which contributed to the fact that people on the list of suspects in vain made them worry. Man-hours and financial resources were spent. All this is in vain.
450 people were arrested, most of whom had to be released with apologies. There were also successful arrests (which, probably, can be called random). In other words, the police “caught” their system caught the wanted criminals who committed serious crimes: robbery, burglary, fraud.
According to the police, technical problems within the framework of the system’s operation are quite common, since errors can occur in any digital platform for image recognition. Wales police finished creating their own system in June 2017, therefore, they consider the platform “raw” and do not see anything terrible in such a large number of failures. In most cases, the problem is in poor quality photographs, both those contained in the database and those provided from surveillance cameras.
As far as can be judged, there are more accurate image recognition systems. For example, in China, in the city of Zhengzhou, police this year issued special glasses with video cameras that are connected wirelessly to a software platform for face recognition. It is very difficult to find a criminal on your own, since only 70 to 120 thousand passengers
pass through the East Zhengzhou Railway Station
daily .
In the same China in April of this year, they caught a suspect in economic crimes at a concert with 50 thousand spectators. He went there for 90 km from the city in which he was hiding. After the arrest, the Chinese confessed that if he had known something about the current possibilities of the police, he would never have gone to the concert.
Chinese systems are quite effective. In 2017, for the sake of the experiment, the Air Force correspondent, John Sudworth, was brought to the police base, giving him the status of a suspect. Security guards found the "criminal" in just 7 minutes in a city of 4 million people. Now the country has more than 170 million surveillance cameras. Of these, about 20 million are connected to the AI platform.
American cops began testing video glasses even earlier - in 2014. Then, law enforcement officers were given Google Glass, which
began to be used in daily work. About the results of the experiment, unfortunately, nothing is known.
Whatever it was, but the police do not shy away from new technologies, so it must be thought that the detection of crimes will soon be more effective than it is now.