When smart tech meets criminal minds: How innovation is creating – and cracking – crime
In Monroe, Washington, a man dressed in a yellow vest, breathing mask and blue shirt robbed an armored truck. He pepper-sprayed a guard and stole a bag of money and legged it. Police chased him and ran around the corner only to find a large group of men dressed in exactly the same outfit. As it turned out, the clever crim had put out a Craigslist ad asking for people to show up at that specific date and time, dressed just like him.
This week on The Innovation Ramble we explore how innovation is making new crimes possible but how smart tech and new strategies are the new Batman and Robin.
What is a crime?
The definition of a crime is an unlawful act as defined by the state, making it positive (man-made) law. To be classified as a crime two elements must be present – the act of doing something criminal (as determined by the Latin term ‘actus reus’) and the intention of doing something criminal (mens rea). If either of these is missing or affected, the judgement and punishment laid down by the state can be altered – such as when mentally impaired people are said to have ‘diminished responsibility’ for a crime.
Innovation and crime go hand in hand. The invention of a gun allowed one person to rob a one person, the train allowed one person to rob hundreds of people and now hacking has allowed one person to rob millions at once as we’ve seen with the recent breach of Carphone Warehouse security.
The good news is that the cops are fighting back. In 2007 Anne Milgram, the attorney general of the state of New Jersey, attempted to reduce recidivism by commissioning a nationwide study. The findings suggested that across the entire United States, only between five and 10 per cent of all US jurisdictions used any type of risk assessment tool to predict the likelihood of criminals reoffending. Her team used the data collected from 1.5 million cases and built a universal risk assessment tool that reduced the 900-plus risk factors to a more manageable set of nine questions. The results of their efforts included taking Camden, NJ off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America. This happened because they’d managed to reduce Camden murders by 41 per cent – the equivalent of saving 37 lives. Holy Big Data Batman!
Remember Minority Report? That kind of policing is not that far away. Pred Pol is a data-mining method intended to anticipate the location and participants or victims in future crimes. Officers get a prediction in an area of 500ft by 500ft. It takes into account previous crimes, location, officer reports, weather, traffic and other public data using a similar algorithm of predicting earthquakes after shocks. In the city of Durham US violent crime is down 39 per cent which is attributed to using Pred Pol.
Innovative crime fighting tech was behind 'Sweetie', a computer-generated 10-year-old Filippino girl used to find paedophiles on the the internet. Created by the Dutch arm of children's rights organization Terre des hommes, it was used to lure online sexual predators into providing personally-identifiable information, so that this information could then be reported to law enforcement agencies. Sweetie operated for 10 weeks, during which over 1000 predators, in 71 countries, were identified.
The democratisation of policing is moving at pace. Local law enforcement can now be achieved through citizen policing. In Mexico, locals are fighting back using an internet-based solution: crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers using Google Maps.
And in South Africa, Dr Sonnet Ehlers developed an anti rape condom to protect women during the World Cup. The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man's penis during penetration. Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it. "It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it's on," Ehlers said. "If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter."
Doing the Innovation Ramble Podcast has taught us that there is an unending stream of innovation focused on first world problems. There are apps that help us keep an eye on our pets, drones that deliver pizza and smartwatches the pay for our coffee. Do we really need an army of startups focussing on these issues? Probably not. The innovations in this week’s episode are protecting us from crime are actually making our world a better place. Hats off to them.
Tom Ollerton is We Are Social's marketing and innovation director and Alastair Cole is chief innovation officer at Partners Andrews Aldridge / Engine Group. You can follow their innovation ramblings @innovramble and subscribe to the Innovation Ramble on iTunes.