Somebody would be reminded of Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Minority Report‘ set in a future where crimes are anticipated via a system called Precrime, based on the premonitions of three persons with extra-sensorial powers of amplified precognition.
Today there is something more realistic than extra-sensorial powers to prevent crimes: the “data“. A number of companies worldwide are developing predictive systems that apply to different areas, including the fight against crime, known as predictive policing.
These softwares are reaching some level of technological maturity, increasing the reliability and attractiveness for the venture capital industry, even those dealing with social innovation such as Oltre Venture, Italy’s only venture capital company that, since 2006, has invested in companies with a strong social impact, by means of capital, management skills and know-how.
Oltre Venture has led a recent substantial investment of 1.2 million euros in KeyCrime, an Italian startup founded by a former policeman (Mario Venturi, now CEO of the company), who has developed a predictive policing system, allowing to prevent crimes. The software, which has already been successfully tested by the Milan Police, is currently limited to the prevention of kidnappings committed by serial offenders. Basically, by entering the data of the robberies already committed in the KeyCrime system, this software correlates and calculates the probability of further events, including day, time and city area.
Of course, the system can be scaled on other types of crimes (for example home robbery and gender-based abuse), the algorithm can still evolve a lot, leveraging even more artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the results already achieved, have been extraordinary.
KeyCrime, during a long trial phase carried out in Milan to fight against robbery, has achieved important results in the prevention and repression of these crimes, results “measured”, among others, by the Faculty of Economics of Essex University (UK) and the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston (USA).
The reduction by half of the robberies is certainly a positive social effect, noted also by Luciano Balbo, founder of Oltre Venture which, since long has been promoting an innovation model on the national territory, able to match financial results with development and social wealth targets. KeyCrime, in short, fits into this context, as it allows targeted strengthening of security and better protection of communities. The Oltre Venture website shows what the social impact factors of this startup exactly are:
- Decrease in the number of crimes
- Increase in the length of penalties for offenders as a result of connections with other offences
- Reduction of costs for legal authorities
- Improvement of security for serving agents who know the characteristics of offenders
Oltre Venture supervised the financial transaction, which was immediately joined by the entrepreneur Giorgio Gandini and by SDG Group, global leader in the analytics sector.
International market expansion is planned, driven by a technological partnership agreement just entered into with IBM.
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