This Software Is Stopping Crime Before It Happens
Premonition is the closest thing there is to Minority Report.
Arik Arad, Former head of EL AL Security, Ben-Gurion International Airport, Israel
Last year in Toronto, undercover private investigators wearing hidden cameras entered a local health clinic they suspected was at the center of a long-running insurance fraud scheme.
The investigators had been hired by insurance company Aviva after the company was tipped off by one of its clients.
The undercover operatives posed as accident victims seeking advice, and the clinic staff were more than happy to oblige.
The damning video shows staff members coaching the PIs on how to play up phony injuries, and signing a bogus attendance log for future appointments that would never be fulfilled.
Thanks to the video, the Toronto police moved swiftly to shut the fraudulent operation down — but far too late to protect the insurer from losing untold thousands to past false claims.
What if There Were a Way to Find the Fraudsters Before They Struck?
Today’s police departments have an avid interest in technologies that help them stay ahead of criminals, including analytics-informed strategies for keeping communities safer. But for all the surveillance tech cops deploy on the streets, when it comes to goings-on in the courthouse, they’re practically blind.
Non-Federal court databases aren’t linked under a larger umbrella, which severely curtails law enforcement’s ability to easily locate information on past civil cases. If they don’t happen to know offhand where a case was tried, an officer must visit individual courthouses (or, at best, their online archives) one by one until they get lucky. (This may take time: there are 3,124 circuit courts in the US.)
Litigation analytics for law enforcement is changing that. Premonition’s Vigil system collects information from all of those courthouses into a single searchable database, making it easy to set alerts for case updates, entities and persons of interest. Agencies can now use Vigil to search for insurance fraud red flags: plaintiffs who file suit after suit, for example, or witnesses who seem to turn up in case after case.
Minority Report, and Predicting Crime Before It Happens
Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report featured the concept of PreCrime — using technology to detect criminal intent before it comes to fruition. Like the flying car, crime-predicting psychics will remain science fiction, but new technology is allowing police to make certain elements of PreCrime a reality.
Do Police Use Analytics to Prevent Crime?
Police have been using analytics-related techniques to manage crime for decades, most notably the CompStat system developed by former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton. Since CompStat was instated, New York City murders have fallen from 1,946 (five per day) in 1993 to 352 in 2015. Other major cities including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Vancouver have followed New York’s lead.
By understanding where crime is concentrated, police can make smarter decisions about where and how to deploy their resources to limit future offenses.
Evidence-Based Policing
These strategies are part of a broader move toward evidence-based policing. Experimental criminologist Lawrence Sherman defined it as:
Evidence-based policing is the use of the best available research on the outcomes of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units, and officers.
Law Enforcement and Legal Analytics
Premonition uses web crawlers to progressively scrape information added over time to courthouse archives. The firm’s database is recognized as the world’s largest, encompassing millions of cases. The company employs an artificial intelligence to sort the cases so that they are easily searchable by plaintiff, defendant, judge, lawyer, jurisdiction and more.
Legal Analytics for Prosecutors
Choosing whether to press charges, offer plea bargains and pursue appeals is at the district attorney’s discretion. Rather than relying on hunches, prosecutors can use litigation analytics to handicap their odds of securing a conviction based on the track record of judges and defense lawyers.
Predicting the Future of Law Enforcement
Analytics will not replace the wisdom of judges, the creativity of lawyers or the instincts of investigators. But it does offer the possibility of a safer and more efficiently-managed future, and greater justice for all.
All Courts — One System
Until now, searching civil cases in non-Federal Courts meant going to each Courthouse individually. Premonition imports real-time data into the Vigil system. Search all Courts from one system. Set alerts for case updates, entities and persons of interest. Let Vigil watch for you.