China is transforming, and I was fortunate enough to be officially hosted for a week by the Zhejiang Police College in Hangzhou to see and experience it.

During December 2017 and January 2018, the Chinese government released its new strategy called "Made in China 2025." The main goal behind this strategy is the transformation of Chinese industry and economy, from mainly labor-intensive manufacturing of cheap elements into a services-based economy, driven by state-of-the-art technology – especially AI and robotics.

China employs a number of tactics in its strategy, including (among others) automating the workforce by using AI and robotics, and also leveraging these technologies to control the public and its obedience to prevent crimes and any civil unrest.

The last two points are the focus of this article.

I was invited to China to give a talk to the “2018 Police and Science International Forum on Counter-terrorism and Governance of Emerging Crimes in the Era of Big Data”, which took place in Hangzhou. Following the two-day conference, we were taken to visit the district’s police headquarters to see how big-data, AI and huge amounts of CCTV cameras are used to manage their police operations.

The building itself looks like an ordinary 6 story building – not disclosing the amount and level of the technologies installed, operated and controlled from within it. Inside the building no photography was allowed so I can only try and describe the internal design and the layouts of the technologies.

But, before jumping into the details a short background on the police is needed. The Chinese Police have decided to implement advanced surveillance equipment, big data, advanced analytics and AI to enable a future police force. This has three main objectives. The first is predictive policing and prediction of crime. The second is information sharing between the various departments. And the third is to move towards a more data-drive policing.

According to the Rand Corporation predictive policing is defined as “the application of analytical techniques to identify likely targets for police intervention and prevent crime or solve past crimes by making statistical predictions.” During the last decades a shift has been seen around the world in how police organizations are changing their modes of operation from reactive and preventive, to more proactive and predictive (which is still a long way ahead).

But, there is a huge difference between Western countries and their ability to implement predictive policing and the ability of China to do it. There are two main reasons for this – the first is a top-down leadership with vision, strategy and a clear will to execute on it and to commit the required resources to achieve it. The second reason is that China is not bounded by the mores and dilemmas of Western liberal democracies.

Now, back to the building.

Already in the lobby it can be seen that something is different. On the left can be seen their internal police “help desk” with screens everywhere presenting data and graphics.

After exiting the elevator, can be seen immediately in front of you 6 large LCD screens showing 6 different dashboards with information from all over the district. On these screens every police officer can view and read all the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the area in real-time. The data also summarizes aggregated information for each KPI on a daily, weekly and annual basis – data-driven organization at its best.

The screens show basic information such as the number of cases and emergency calls opened that day, but also showing more advanced data. For example, the number of unique car license plates identified, which is shown in real-time as it is being updated through the many thousands of cameras recording everything. It was a late morning visit and the data showed that more than 870,000 individual license plates were identified. The graph next to it shows the weekly summary and daily totals – every day 2.75 million different license plates are scanned and identified (in one district of the city of Hangzhou). Another KPI presents the number of elderly people found thanks to AI. Using the advanced facial recognition software, it has been also decided to help families find their sick elders (dementia, Alzheimer etc.) if they go missing. When a family member calls the police and reports the missing person, a photo of the person will be requested and uploaded into the system. Immediately the system starts a scan of all already identified people within that time in order to find a match. Once the person is identified a full trace of the movements is created and a police car will be sent to the location. The fastest “missing case” was solved within 15 minutes. In the first six months of 2017 190 cases of missing elderly people have been solved.

Turning into the floor where the intelligence officers work there is a large open-space with a hi-tech design divided into neighborhoods with collaboration spaces. The walls on each side of the floor are covered with large LCD screens presenting real-time and aggregated information relevant for the intelligence officers. From one of the corners of the floor there is a corridor, which looks like the one on the star-ship Enterprise, leading to the heart, brain and the central nerve system.

The Command and Control Center

We were four visitors, and our first response once we entered the command center was “WOW!”.

The command center’s height covers two floors, as the main screen is 70 square meters (or 754 square feet), divided into 6 dynamic areas that present the entire information of the city and everything that is going in it – all in real-time. In front of this huge, full HD, screen there is the nerve center from where executive commanders manage incidents. Behind it there are ready workstations where about 20 analysts access and present any piece of information that is requested.

In the city, every person and moving object is recorded, documented and analyzed.

Extensive and pervasive use of AI. This is real-time predictive policing.

Every police officer, whether on foot, on bicycle or in a squad car is monitored with GPS tracking. Every path and route are recorded and are retraceable for any time point or period. In this district alone, there are around 10,000 police officers (in China there are about 4 million police officers).

One of their underlying assumptions of police command and control that AI is a force multiplier, meaning that AI will allow fewer police officers while achieving more security and public order. When everything and everyone is recorded and monitored there is no need for so many police in the field. Everything is controlled and operated remotely and as needed. Reactive and preventive policing is losing its meaning and need.

One of the main features of the command center is the detailed GIS map with its dozens of information layers, accessible through a click of a button.

Another feature of the central screen is a region showing dozens of flags representing the different nationalities of the people roaming the city, with the number of them next to each flag. Everything in real-time.

The magnitude, the order, the technology, the details, the level of control – finally the understanding that this is a real command and control of a real city in real time – it is simply jaw dropping.

It seems that the Chinese Police is at least a generation ahead of any other Western police organization.

From Predictive to Prescriptive Policing

Until recently it was probably quite easy to “disappear” in China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people over 9,597,000 sq. kilometers. But today it is becoming almost impossible because of this massive scale AI-enabled CCTV surveillance project. While there are today 170 million cameras in China; by 2020 they plan to have 570 million installed (today in the UK there are around 6 million CCTV cameras, 500,000 of them in London alone).

One of the objectives with the huge CCTV array is to track down and catch fugitives – a high priority for the police. Using AI for facial recognition, an active hunt in real-time can be performed, but also retrospectively in a passive mode. Each fugitive’s photo is uploaded in the system, and immediately the search begins. Already, the system has identified automatically 500 fugitives in the district. The system performs automated “lineups” of the fugitives and provides alerts and notifications. Each alert includes at least two photos, the one from the police and the one taken in real-time. The alert is assigned with a level of certainty of identification, and each photo receiving 88% or higher is assigned an order of action. The detection is not only based on one angle or a single camera, but is recorded on several cameras, thus increasing the certainty of identification. Each and every police officer receives a smartphone with a dedicated application that allows connection and access to every camera in the city, and also receiving information and instructions from the command center.

If other industries are examined, we see that AI or robotics are used to automate (augment or substitute) tasks or complete jobs of humans.

In the “Made in China 2025” there is an aggressive plan to automate many millions of employees, and it seems that the police will also be affected.

Figure 1- Counter-terrorism robot with advanced AI capabilities (Dahua)

The fact that police officers are assigned policing tasks by an AI is the beginning of the automation of policemen. An AI enabled, and automated dispatch of the police is very similar to the automated dispatch Uber innovated. The next phase may be the automation of police officers themselves, i.e. AI or robotic substitutes.It is not by chance that China gave the name “Skynet” to their CCTV surveillance system. Prescriptive policing is around the corner.

The Chinese Police is changing its mode of operations - from field-driven to data-driven – remotely controlled and activated.





Private-Public Partnership

When we think of China we might think that it is very hierarchical, and the command structure is very clear. But, reality is much more complex. For example, the fire department is under the command of the Chinese army, and traffic control is not under the command of the police. Meaning, that if the police’s command center, which monitors every road, car and person, needs to manage traffic lights, will need to send a request to a different department.

Hangzhou is the one of first cities to deploy this technology on a wide scale and is acting as a living “laboratory” to understand, test and improve the use of it. The city is still in the experimentation phase to really understand the added value of such systems, and how to improve them. They have multiple objectives; the main ones being lower crime rates and decreasing robbery incidents by reducing to a minimum the use of cash.

To accomplish these objectives, the city and police partnered with the private sector for both hardware and software. For the command center technologies, CCTV cameras and AI capabilities they have been working closely with Dahua. Of course, for Dahua there is a huge business incentive for it to work, so there is heavy investment from their side. Other companies include Alibaba, and specifically AliPay their mobile financial services application. In Hangzhou one can use AliPay to pay for everything – cinema tickets, subway, buses, taxis, toll roads, shops, food etc. This enables a true cashless environment where everything is payable with a mobile phone. According to the police, ATMs are one of the most dangerous places in China, as most robberies occur there after cash withdrawals.

All AliPay transactions are monitored to prevent fraud, “e-robberies”, drug deals and other sorts of exploitation. The police have access to the data for any forensic and investigative need.

The cooperation of private companies with the Chinese Police and government may look and feel extreme, and as the “end of privacy”, but it shouldn’t be surprising. In the West there is also an increase in what is known to be the military-industrial complex. It is not only limited to the military, but also to various police departments across the US (and more and more across the world). One of the latest disclosures was a 6 year long cooperation between the New Orleans Police Department and the Silicon Valley based company Palantir to implement predictive policing. One of the differences between Western countries implementing ‘predictive policing’ from China, is that in the West it tends to be done in secrecy while in China it is public knowledge.





Looking ahead

It is not only crime that the city wants to decrease, but also the police-citizen interface and bureaucracy. Using the massive-scale CCTV array all accidents involving cars and drivers can be recorded and identified, and reports/tickets automatically sent – no need to involve a police squad car in minor or routine incidents.

The use of advanced technologies may cause a disconnection between the police and the public increasing the perceived distance between the two, thus lowering trust. Police forces, wherever they are located, are public servants and require the support and trust of the public to operate and achieve their objectives.

In CCTV cameras installed in schools there is violent behavior recognition AI to identify and reduce school violence and bullying. In the near future it is planned to deploy this capability city wide.

Furthermore, there is a program to integrate the national ID into AliPay. This way the only thing Chinese citizens will need is a smartphone for all their interactions and transactions with the private sector, and also with the government.

From a normal public-private partnership model we move into a public-private integration model.

AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and it needs a lot of data. So, if as it is commonly known, that “data is the new oil”, then China has built probably the largest data refinery in the world.

Through the use of vast amounts of data and AI they know what type of crime will happen and where it will happen. The challenge now is to match the identity of the criminal to the crime prediction itself. In a report on the pitfalls of ‘predictive policing’, the Rand Corporation mentioned that “no algorithm is likely to ever predict with absolute certainty the who-when-where of a crime.”

Finally, new criminology theories may be required, as “hot spots” and “broken windows” do not support the new reality of the future of policing.

There is a clear top-down vision and strategy, which is also clear and understood by the police officers themselves. But, there is a bigger challenge – the ability of the police to explain to the algorithms’ casualties its decisions.

This is a very ambitious strategy, but if any country can execute and deliver on it - it's China.











