YOKOHAMA – The Kanagawa Prefectural Police plan to become the first in the nation to introduce predictive policing, a method of anticipating crimes and accidents using artificial intelligence, sources said Sunday. The Kanagawa police will seek research expenses under the prefecture's budget for fiscal 2018 starting April, hoping to put a predictive policing system in place on a trial basis before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, prefectural government sources said. A system that can determine whether a single perpetrator is behind several crimes, predict an offender's next move and detect where and when crimes or accidents are likely to occur would help police officers investigate crimes and prevent some from happening, they said. It would allow them to patrol the suggested places at the most likely times to ensure safety and would also help speed up probes, the sources said. The AI-based system would employ a "deep learning" algorithm that allows the computer to teach itself by analyzing big data.