This article explores the potential for Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enable a more effective, prevention focused and less confrontational policing model that has hitherto been too resource consuming to implement at scale. Problem-Oriented Pol
icing (POP) is a potential replacement, at least in part, for traditional policing which adopts a reactive approach, relying heavily on the criminal justice system. By contrast, POP seeks to prevent crime by manipulating the underlying conditions that allow crimes to be committed. Identifying these underlying conditions requires a detailed understanding of crime events - tacit knowledge that is often held by police officers but which can be challenging to derive from structured police data. One potential source of insight exists in unstructured free text data commonly collected by police for the purposes of investigation or administration. Yet police agencies do not typically have the skills or resources to analyse these data at scale. In this article we argue that NLP offers the potential to unlock these unstructured data and by doing so allow police to implement more POP initiatives. However we caution that using NLP models without adequate knowledge may either allow or perpetuate bias within the data potentially leading to unfavourable outcomes.
Information extraction and question answering have the potential to introduce a new paradigm for how machine learning is applied to criminal law. Existing approaches generally use tabular data for predictive metrics. An alternative approach is needed
for matters of equitable justice, where individuals are judged on a case-by-case basis, in a process involving verbal or written discussion and interpretation of case factors. Such discussions are individualized, but they nonetheless rely on underlying facts. Information extraction can play an important role in surfacing these facts, which are still important to understand. We analyze unsupervised, weakly supervised, and pre-trained models' ability to extract such factual information from the free-form dialogue of California parole hearings. With a few exceptions, most F1 scores are below 0.85. We use this opportunity to highlight some opportunities for further research for information extraction and question answering. We encourage new developments in NLP to enable analysis and review of legal cases to be done in a post-hoc, not predictive, manner.
