Police Uses Artificial Intelligence

NSW Police has infused its insights platform with Microsoft Azure-based artificial intelligence and machine learning services to fast-track video and audio evidence analysis. Microsoft worked with Australia’s largest policing agency to containerised cognitive processing for the core investigation platform in Azure and feed the results back.

The work comes ahead of the future migration of insights to Azure, which is expected to take place shortly. NSW Police is working to set up a protected-level Azure data centre under what it calls the Azura Cloud Project to support its broader transformation program.NSW Police expects to retire, re-architect or replace more than 200 legacy systems with cloud-based systems as part of the program. It plans to use Azure to support a range of applications, including the integrated policing operating system that will replace its legacy core policing system.

IPOS, as well as the insights platform, are considered the building blocks for a digital evidence cloud that has been built and trialled with Microsoft and is ready to scale. In doing so, the force was able to interpret petabytes of CCTV footage automatically and at speed to provide rapid access to leads that officers can pursue. A terabyte worth of computer vision is pulled each day to support investigations, including from CCTV, body-worn video cameras and dashcams.

NSW Police lead architect for the insights platform Raj Bhaskaran said extensive testing and training of the cognitive services had been done before their use to ensure biases were avoided. Police collected 14,000 pieces of CCTV as part of a murder and assault investigation and analysed it in a manner faster than it previously could