The man was notably short on specifics. All he knew was that the truck that ran over his wife in Nagpur had red markings on it. He could neither identify its size nor make. The police used artificial intelligence or AI, to help arrest the accused within 36 hours.
On Raksha Bandhan, August 9, the man and his wife were on a bike when they were hit by a speeding truck in Nagpur. The woman fell on the road. The truck ran her over and fled the scene. The man then tied his wife's body to his bike - a disturbing video of the incident is in wide circulation - to take her to their village in Madhya Pradesh.
The victim was able to provide "very minimal information", Harsh Poddar, Superintendent of Police, Nagpur Rural, told NDTV.
Asked how the cops zeroed in on the accused with so little information available, Mr Poddar said they collected the CCTV data and ran it through artificial intelligence algorithms.
"What was done here was that CCTV footage, or as we call it metadata, of three separate toll nakas, which were at a distance of 15-20 km from each other, was collected and it was analysed using two AI algorithms. Both of which were based on a technology called Computer Visual," Mr Poddar said.
"The first algorithm, what it did was it analysed this total CCTV footage to pull out and identify trucks with red markings. The second one analysed the average speed of all these trucks to be able to give us an alert as to which truck could be involved. On that basis, one truck was identified. Day before yesterday, a team from Nagpur rural police arrested the accused and seized the truck from the Gwalior-Kanpur highway, which is about 700 km from Nagpur. And we have now arrested the accused and the case has been cracked within 36 hours using AI," the officer elaborated.
Maharashtra has created a special purpose vehicle named MARVEL (Maharashtra Research and Vigilance for Enhanced Law Enforcement), the first state-level police AI system in the country. It is owned wholly by the state.
"It has been created to introduce and use AI in law enforcement agencies as well as other departments of the government of Maharashtra. The basic idea is to be able to analyse and use government metadata to be able to create AI solutions that belong to the government of Maharashtra instead of getting them from outside," said the police officer.
"We have been working with as many as 13 different departments to create solutions. The main fuel for AI is data and given the government is such a large repository of data we have been analysing it to create AI solutions across the entire ecosystem. I am also happy to say that many other large states have expressed interest in this model since Maharashtra is the first state that has created this and are in the process of replicating Marvel," he said further.
Asked how physical investigation is different from AI, the officer said the use of technology helps speed things up. The data could be analysed within minutes to help arrive at solutions, said the police officer.
"We get several terabytes of metadata, these could be complex financial crimes, organised crimes where large amounts of telecom data, for eg, is there. The earlier model was to use experienced police officials who would analyse patterns in this data. There was obviously a big margin for human error in such cases. And it could take several weeks, to months to analyse large sets of data. Today, with the power of AI and high-speed processors, we are able to analyse this data within a matter of minutes. So for example, 12 hours of CCTV data that existed in this case, could be analysed within 12-15 minutes, which earlier could have taken more than a day," said the officer.
