Police in England and Wales are introducing chatbots to help with non-urgent calls, allowing officers to handle emergencies quicker.
The use of a chatbot named Bobbi is part of a drive to embrace technology. Other AI technology, including live facial recognition, will be introduced in the biggest shake-up in policing for decades announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
The changes were revealed in the UK government’s White Paper on police reforms, which proposes the creation of a “British FBI” for England and Wales called the National Police Service and a reduction in the number of police forces.
Ms Mahmood announced that £115 million ($157.9 million) will be spent on the technology, overseen by a national centre known as Police. AI.
The goal is to free up officers from time-consuming tasks such as producing and redacting files before court cases and analysing video from CCTV, doorbell and body cameras. Using AI to complete such tasks would release six million policing hours each year, the equivalent of 3,000 full-time officers, according to statistics.
The Home Office said chatbots will “create efficiencies in triaging non-urgent online queries” and will be asked to decide whether a 111 call is directed to an officer, a call handler or another emergency service.
Ms Mahmood said “criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways”, but “some police forces are still fighting crime with analogue methods”.
“We will roll out state-of-the-art tech to get more officers on the streets and put rapists and murderers behind bars,” she added.
British forces have been struggling with call volumes. London's Metropolitan Police recently revealed that only 15 per cent of 999 calls made are genuine emergencies.
In the past year, Met call handlers have been contacted by people frustrated by delivery drivers not turning up, someone who had a spider in their room and another whose dog was not coming back into the house.
Two English forces – Thames Valley and Hampshire and Isle of Wight – adopted the Bobbi AI chatbot system last year. For generations, officers have been referred to as “bobbies” after Robert Peel, the reformist Conservative politician who set up the Met in the late 1820s.
The pilot system answers frequently asked, non-emergency questions and help ease pressure on call handlers.
Matt Jukes, the Met's Deputy Commissioner, does not agree that AI would end the role of beat officers on the streets, as represented by PC George Dixon, the protagonist in the BBC TV drama Dixon of Dock Green that ran for 21 years from 1955.
“The difference for Dixon of Dock Green after these reforms is that in his or her hand will be officer-controlled facial recognition technology and AI, leading them to prioritise the work in their area,” he said.
The National Police Service will tackle serious crime, merging the existing National Crime Agency, Counter Terror Policing, the National Police Air Service and National Roads Policing into a single organisation.
Work to set up the service will begin this year and it is believed it will be finalised in the next parliament. A review to establish how many forces in England and Wales to cut will report back this summer, with some mergers expected by the next general election.
Devolved administrations in Scotland and Northern Ireland have single police forces.
