Crime GPT: How AI is Helping Police Forces in India, 2024

Crime GPT, an AI-powered platform developed by Gurugram-based tech startup Staqu, is revolutionizing the way police forces in India approach criminal investigations.

In a city bustling with activity, a pickpocket expertly relieves an unsuspecting victim of their wallet, disappearing into the crowd. By the time the victim realizes what has happened, the trail has gone cold. This all-too-common scenario is exactly the kind of challenge that a cutting-edge AI platform called Crime GPT aims to tackle.

AI-Powered Crime GPT Revolutionizes Law Enforcement

This innovative tool utilizes a powerful language model trained on a massive database of over 9,00,000 criminal records from Uttar Pradesh. By integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, Crime GPT can provide accurate and factual responses to natural language queries, significantly enhancing investigative capabilities.

Developed by the Gurugram-based tech startup Staqu Technologies, Crime GPT is revolutionizing the way law enforcement approaches criminal investigations in India. Founded in 2015 by a team of AI experts, Staqu has been working to redefine policing through its flagship product, Trinetra 2.0, which integrates Crime GPT – a powerful language model.

“When we talk about big data, videos and images are the largest data floating on the Internet currently. The idea was to target India’s big data and make these dumb or analogue cameras smarter,” explains Atul Rai, Staqu’s co-founder and CEO.

The origins of Crime GPT can be traced back to 2018, when Staqu created Trinetra 1.0 – a platform that allowed police forces to digitize their criminal records, including photographs and other key details. This laid the groundwork for the next phase: harnessing AI to unlock the potential of this data.

“Trinetra 2.0 is an extension of Trinetra where we have added the GPT which can also analyse the unstructured data in the form of text,” Rai says.

How Crime GPT Works:

• Crime GPT can comprehend natural language queries and sift through unstructured data like First Information Reports (FIRs) and interrogation records.
• Based on the query, it provides detailed information on suspects, including their history, associated crimes, and police stations with recorded offenses.
• This acts as a virtual assistant for police officers, enabling them to access crucial information quickly and efficiently.

Crime GPT’s capabilities go far beyond traditional databases. By integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, the model can comprehend natural language queries and provide accurate, factual responses based on the wealth of information in the system.

For example, if a police officer is searching for a 21-year-old suspect charged with attempted murder, Crime GPT can quickly sift through the database, identify relevant records, and provide detailed information about the suspect’s criminal history, associated crimes, and the police stations where offenses have been recorded.

“It can help as an effective assistant. For instance, some police forces do not have any platform. They can neither perform facial recognition or an audio search nor can they do any LLM search. So today, the police have a virtual assistant,” Rai explains.

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Addressing Challenges:

• Crime GPT has overcome the challenge of data being primarily in regional languages and unstructured formats by developing a suite of AI models for tasks like optical character recognition (OCR), translation, and tokenisation.
• This ensures seamless processing of diverse data inputs from the police force.

Ethical Considerations:

• Staqu has placed a strong emphasis on ethical considerations, with a dedicated team from the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (UPSTF) closely monitoring the outputs of the system.
• The bias problem is being addressed by using filtered data, ensuring that the AI model is trained on accurate and unbiased information.

Impact and Future:

• The impact of Staqu’s solutions is already being felt across India, with nine state police forces, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab, actively using the Trinetra platform. The response from the ground has been overwhelmingly positive, with the demand for the technology spreading to other states.
• Staqu is looking forward to incorporating audio and video analytics, envisioning a future where every CCTV camera can be transformed into an intelligent device providing real-time insights and alerts.

“The integration of a digitized criminal database with AI-powered Crime GPT has revolutionized our investigative capabilities,” says Amitabh Yash, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order), UP Special Task Force. “This advanced technology allows for custom inputs, enabling our police force to access detailed information on persons of interest and criminals swiftly and accurately.”

As Staqu looks to the future, the company is exploring further advancements, such as audio and video analytics, with the goal of transforming every “dumb” CCTV camera into an intelligent, AI-powered device that can generate real-time insights and alerts.

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