As of today, Artificial Intelligence has gone mainstream and it plays a crucial role in our day-to-day lives. As a matter of fact, the very idea of using Intelligent systems to control the human race has long been aroused the humans. And now with startling advancements in state-of-the-art technologies like Artificial Intelligence, it very much seems attainable in the near future. As it turns out, the Durham police department in the UK is experimenting on AI powered systems for predicting how likely a suspect is to commit a crime in the future and of what type. All these factors will be taken into account while releasing a suspect on bail or post the completion of his/her jail term. It will help them decide whether a suspect should be kept in custody or given a bail. As revealed by Independent.co.uk, Durham Police is training the intelligent systems to determine the possibility of a suspect committing crime in the future after being released.

The intelligent system devised for this purpose is called HART which is loosely an acronym for Harm Assessment Risk Tool. The system is being trained using Durham constabulary data collected from 2008 to 2013. The HART will closely scrutinize the suspect’s profile and will consider various factors like the gender of the suspect, age of the suspect and the crimes committed by him in the past. It will further help the high ranking officers to realize how risky it would be to release a suspect at any point of time.

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Using HART To Consolidate The Law

A major part of the system was developed at Cambridge University and it is mainly devised to avert the release of the potentially dangerous prisoners who would otherwise be a risk to the entire society. HART can also be used to classify the prisoners on par with their criminal record. For instance, it will give a low, moderate or high-risk tags to various criminals. Based on these tags given by HART, the police can decide where to keep the criminal so that there is no potential risk of a prison break. Several tests were conducted on the AI powered system at Cambridge University to check its accuracy and the results were mostly positive. The system was found to be accurate 98 percent of the time when a low-risk suspect was to be scrutinized and the accuracy was 88 percent when it scrutinized a high-risk criminal.

However, the system identified Black suspects as high-risk criminals more often than the White ones. But on further investigation, some results were found to be partly inaccurate. This however, undermines the fact that the system is ready to be used, not for now at least. Although the results are mostly in favor of HART but you can’t ignore even the slight possibility of a miscalculation as it may lead to bigger problems in the future. The researchers say that the erroneous nature may be due to the bugs persisting in the AI algorithm used in HART and only after dealing with all these setbacks, the system will go mainstream.