This week, the New South Wales Police announced the introduction of upgrades to their Insights policing platform. This new technology is designed to provide further services to frontline officers through faster access to critical information in the course of their roles in identifying persons and criminal activity across the state. Powered by Microsoft Azure cognitive technologies, the machine learning and deep learning capabilities were fully deployed in February 2021, with the goal of reducing police labour hours on manual data processing tasks, such as reviewing video feeds. Examples of how the AI systems will be used include one case were NSW Police collected 14,000 pieces of CCTV footage as part of a murder and assault investigation which would previously have taken detectives months to analyse. Microsoft claims the AI/ML infused Insights platform ingested this huge volume of information in five hours and prepared it for analysis by NSW Police Force investigators, a process which would otherwise have taken many weeks to months.

NSW Police has "infused" its insights platform with Microsoft Azure-based artificial intelligence and machine learning services to fast-track video and audio evidence analysis. Microsoft recently worked with Australia's largest policing agency to containerise cognitive processing for the core investigation platform in Azure and feed the results back. The work comes ahead of a future migration of insights to Azure, which is expected to take place "shortly". As revealed by iTnews in April, NSW Police is working to stand up a protected-level Azure data centre under what it calls the'Azura Cloud Project' to support its broader transformation program. NSW Police expects to retire, re-architect or replace more than 200 legacy systems with cloud-based systems as part of the program.

Sci-Fi movies have long played on our fear of artificially intelligent robot armies taking over the world, but hidden and often secret algorithms are already busy at work in society, delivering sometimes life-changing consequences. Humanoid robots, capable of thinking, moving and talking, is the most common imagery when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, but incredibly powerful computer algorithms, which silently churn through oceans of data, also fall under the AI umbrella. Computers are already making important decisions and influential judgements in the key societal pillars of justice, policing, employment and finance. NSW Police are known to be using a controversial algorithm which claims to predict youth crime before it happens. But critics of NSW Police's Suspect Target Management Plan (STMP) system argue the software is racist, and unfairly blacklists and targets Aboriginal youths.