Briefs

Many more crimes might be solved if detectives were able to compare the records for cases with all the files on past crimes. Now an artificial intelligence system has been designed to do precisely that. Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it could look for telltale similarities in crime records and alert detectives when it finds them.

Developed by computer scientists Tom Muscarello and Kamal Dahbur at DePaul University in Chicago, the system uses pattern-recognition software to link related crimes that may have taken place in widely separated areas whose police forces may rarely be in close contact.

Called the Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP), the system sifts through all the case records available to it, assigning numerical values to different aspects of each crime, such as the kind of offence, the perpetrator�s sex, height and age, and the type of weapon or getaway vehicle used. From these figures it builds a crime description profile. A neural network program then uses this to seek out crimes with similar profiles.

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