Technology Is the New Detective in Crime

Zoomer | August 17th, 2010

(NC)—For most Canadians, summer signals rest, relaxation and easy living, but for police forces across the country, soaring temperatures often mean heightened crime. Violence and aggression tend to rise with the temperatures, but this seasonal spike in crime could soon be a thing of the past with new advances in technology.

IBM recently identified three smart technologies that have the potential to make our communities safer in the years to come. They include:
Caught in the act

Imagine if police officers could prevent a robbery before it happened? With new advancements in technology, police services across the country are doing just that. Analyzing millions of data points housed in various police records, new technologies can help unveil crime trends and patterns, providing front line officers with greater insight on where offenders may strike next. With real-time access to this information, officers on the front lines can respond more quickly, thwarting potential crimes before they occur. It’s all in the details

It’s often a mundane detail that ultimately solves a crime. A nickname. A parking ticket. A past address. These mundane details—billions of them— populate filing cabinets and data warehouses across the country. Police forces will soon have the ability to make connections between crimes, stitching together these details and identifying duplicate records stored in multiple databases to solve the crime. One call does it all

After witnessing an accident, it is often difficult to know what emergency service is required. Fire? Ambulance? Police? With emerging technologies, witnesses will no longer have to make this life or death decision. At the new Emergency Response Center in Madrid, advanced technology immediately alerts police, ambulance and the fire brigade upon receiving an emergency call. This smart system can also recognize if calls from several different sources relate to a single or multiple incidents, deploying the correct emergency personnel to each location.

You can learn more about the smarter public safety technologies of the future online at www.asmarterplanet.com.