Can science crack crime?

One explanation given for the significant increases in Home Office crime statistics combines the growing population of 18-24 year old men - who commit most crime - with the fact that increasing affluence makes more property available for them to steal. While this may or may not be correct, do we really need to reprise the tired old debate about policing and sentencing? Is it now time to employ science, not politics, to address it? It does not take a mathematician to deduce that it is difficult for 120,000 police officers to solve the annual crop of 5 million reported crimes, given that about 80 per cent of calls to police forces demand their attention to other issues. So, if they cannot work harder, can technology help them to work smarter? The answer is that it can because it has already done so on innumerable occasions - fingerprints, radio, the automobile and DNA testing, to name but four. The fact that these examples already exist, together with smart operational practices such as targeting prolific offenders, is proof-positive that working smarter is not enough by itself. Crime continues to rise, after all.

Working smarter

  The hurdle to jump over is that while these examples enable smarter working, they are not intelligent in themselves. They are thus limited by the time available to individual police officers, which is itself limited by our inability to afford them in sufficient numbers. Three key words arise from this analysis: intelligent, affordable and quantity. By an interesting coincidence, they are the very three words that best describe the digital revolution.

Security surveillance has been late in catching up with the digital revolution. This is intriguing because few would deny the generally positive impact of analogue CCTV systems on crime prevention and detection. Their weakness is that, like the previous examples of smarter working, they admit limited economies of scale. Each analogue system stands alone consuming someone’s time in a usually random monitoring process.

Digital multiplier

  But what if the situation changed? What if CCTV became intelligent enough to find a specific person or thing without geographical limit and without consuming anyone’s time? What if the digital multiplier effect we have seen in mobile communications made it much more affordable? And what if this level of affordability and intelligence made cameras as prolific and easy to install as post-it notes.

None of this is science fiction. It is probably five years away, at most. In purely technical terms, it is here now. Cameras programmed to perform automatic number plate recognition can find stolen cars. With face recognition, the same principle applies to missing or wanted people. When surveillance throws off its local shackles, every camera can effectively become part of a single system.

In practical terms, this could mean that a national car crime office at the DVLC in Swansea will find stolen vehicles in Plymouth and Newcastle in seconds and without involving a single police officer in the search, probably a more effective way to meet the government’s 30 per cent reduction target than present methods. It might mean that television appeals for ‘have you seen this man’ will be replaced by a telephone call from a detective in Manchester to a colleague in London with the message: “We’d like to talk to the man tying his shoelace under the clock at Victoria Station.” It will almost certainly mean that cameras with integral motion detection or linked to alarm systems will give police control rooms instant real-time pictures of burglars at work - or save a lot of time by confirming false alarms. Links to cash machines will do the same for card thieves.

The difference between all this and previous examples of smart working is that it is high volume, intrinsically intelligent and potentially cheap.

“Although the cost of replacing entire analogue systems has been a major factor slowing the inevitable change to digital, teh technology now exists to maintain the value of the existing investment.”

Remote monitoring

Digital surveillance has already eliminated the technical constraints on the transmission of camera images over long distances.

At the same time, it has impacted capital costs by removing the need to build individual transmission infrastructures, drastically reduce on-site cabling requirements, making line amplification a thing of the past and eliminating the need for such costly peripherals as video recording and multiplex equipment.

When mass production becomes viable, capital reductions will probably introduce the £35 camera.

Although the cost of replacing entire analogue systems has been a major factor slowing the inevitable change to digital, the technology now exists to maintain the value of existing investment by converting analogue cameras to full digital operation.

A single box encoder/decoder digitises video straight from the camera, delivering real-time video via local area networks, wide area networks or internet at 30 frames per second, plus audio and data.

Public demonstration