By Sunny Um WIRED Korea

Police officers break the windows and subdue a man in a suit. The man on the floor does not have any idea what’s going on. Tom Cruise, dressed as a police officer, quickly walks over and handcuffs the man. “I’m placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks,” Cruise says.

It’s a scene from a science fiction film “Minority Report,” set in the year 2054. The film shows a fictional police department “Pre-crime” taking action to stop crimes that have yet to be committed.

This type of policing against crime may start now rather than in 2054, depending on an agreement among diverse stakeholders, including the law enforcement agencies, central and local governments and human rights groups.

Since last year, researchers at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute have been developing a software that predicts future crime using artificial intelligence. ETRI says this AI-operated system will be helpful to the law enforcement agencies when they deal with the four most serious crimes in Korea: murder, robbery, burglary and physical violence.

This AI-operated software relies on the data collected from public surveillance cameras, court rulings, and criminal records. The software generates a percentage of crime risk by analyzing the real-time footage from surveillance cameras.

The settings of time and location are critical in estimating the percentage. For example, the crime percentage could be high in a video of a masked man following a woman walking in a less-populated area in the middle of the night. In contrast, the percentage will be low if a similar incident is played out in the city center at noon.

To take what countermeasures against a high crime risk is still under discussion. Among them are dispatching police officers, turning on the streetlights brighter and playing warning sounds.

ETRI hopes this software will be adopted by the National Police Agency and the CCTV Integrated Control Center, which provides visual data for proactive measures in preventing accidents or crimes, as their counterparts in other countries do.

PredPol, a crime-prediction software in the United States, uses analytics to reduce crimes, which has reportedly cut the violent crime rate by 30 percent in Chicago in 2017. Cheshire Police and Kent Police in the United Kingdom also tried crime-mapping technology.

But critics say installing this AI-operated software for crime prevention in the public sphere could violate the privacy of individuals.

An official from the Personal Information Protection Commission of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety says this system could breach Article 25 of the Personal Information Protection Act. The article states that no one can “install and operate any visual data processing device at open places,” unless it is “necessary” in some circumstances.

“The privacy policy is founded upon a principle to collect people’s private data as minimum as [the government] can, but the AI-operated systems work the opposite,” an official from the Personal Information Protection Policy Division of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety says.

Kim Geon-woo, a researcher at ETRI’s Cyber Security Research Department, says he and his fellow researchers are well aware of the privacy problem.

To protect the privacy of citizens, Kim says ETRI’s software will implement a “facial masking technology”, which blurs out the people’s faces recorded by surveillance cameras. The original footage will be encrypted and be accessible only to the officials from local governments and the police officers.

Also, this software would not be installed without permission of the local governments. As for now, Kim says the Seocho City Office and the Jeju City Office are participating in the development of the system.

The ministry official says local governments will have to take extra care when using this system, as one of their primary roles is to protect citizens. None of them are guilty of a crime until after they commit it.