Feb. 26, 2026, 7:02 a.m. ET
- Law enforcement agencies are using artificial intelligence to help solve crimes more efficiently.
- AI can organize evidence, enhance biometric recognition and speed up forensic analysis.
- The technology can track vehicles and recognize patterns to help solve cold cases.
As the disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie remains unsolved and investigators continue to ask the public for leads, investigators are using many tools at their disposal, from DNA testing to video surveillance.
With thousands of tips submitted in the disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, how can investigators quickly sift through the large amount of data efficiently?
Law enforcement agencies across the country have turned to artificial intelligence to automate labor-intensive tasks, from recognizing biometric identifiers to tracking vehicles to finding leads within thousands of pieces of evidence.
“I see it being used as something that improves the quality, efficiency and the effectiveness of experts,” said David Ebert, chief AI and data center officer at the University of Arizona.
Ebert said he could not comment on the Guthrie case but talked about AI tools in general.
Ebert previously managed the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence in Visual Analytics, which developed tools for first responders, police officers and others to increase their situational awareness.
Richard Berk, emeritus professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, said AI tools are just fancier versions of what humans already do, whether that is organizing data or finding connections between events.
“They don’t give you a magical solution to the crime. They just organize what you already have,” he said.
What can AI do for law enforcement agencies? Here are a few ways AI could help agencies solve crimes faster.
AI can help agencies organize and sort through thousands of pieces of evidence and tips
AI tools can organize thousands of pieces of evidence or tips that come in during a case.
Berk said agencies can use AI to order events in a crime by using a series of clues and the timestamps of when those events occurred.
“You can do that by hand if you only have three or four things, but if you have 30 or 40 things, that’s a very handy thing,” Berk said.
Axon, a company that makes tools for police and first responders, offers auto tagging to suggest categories for evidence from body-worn cameras.
Ebert said this also allows detectives to search for things that occurred on the cameras rather than fast-forwarding slowly through the videos, saving time.
The publication Wired found U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used AI to summarize enforcement tips from its submission form. The technology offered by Palantir Technologies helped the agency “to more quickly identify and action tips,” the article said.
AI makes biometric recognition faster and more accurate
AI tools can also help enhance technology used to identify people based on their biometrics like fingerprinting and facial recognition.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation increased the speed and precision of fingerprint comparisons with AI technology, according to the peer-reviewed journal Homeland Security Affairs.
AI tools also help enhance low-quality fingerprints, the journal said.
Facial recognition technology also uses AI to more correctly match faces, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Justice. The FBI uses face recognition technology to help identify perpetrators, victims and witnesses in criminal investigations.
“Facial recognition is far from perfect, but it works very often better than eyewitness testimony,” Berk said, noting that eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate and biased.
Some AI tools can track and surveil vehicles and people
Automated license plate recognition software, like that offered by Flock Safety, collects details and the movement of vehicles and stores them on the cloud, an online storage space.
Flock uses machine learning to identify a range of details of vehicles like the make, body type, whether it is missing a plate and other identifiers, like window stickers. Law enforcement agencies can search for data and real-time alerts to avoid sifting through hours of video.
AI can speed up forensic analysis and make it more accurate
AI also can help improve the speed and accuracy of forensic analysis, according to the 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The report noted that AI can help in DNA analysis by interpreting “complex samples that contain small amounts of DNA, mixed DNA, or damaged DNA” that are challenging for traditional types of analysis.
While current AI technology enhances DNA comparison, future uses could include analysis of physical and trace evidence, medical evaluations and assessing crime scenes, the report said.
AI has helped in cold cases because of its pattern recognition
AI technology can also help law enforcement recognize patterns and deviations from those patterns.
Law enforcement can use AI to “take lots of data about how people live their lives and then match it to what they think would fit somebody who potentially knows something about their investigation,” said Sterling Thomas, chief scientist with the federal Government Accountability Office.
A a lot of his work is identifying patterns of potential fraud in the federal government, he said.
Sterling said his office uses an AI tool to help identify fraud by looking at reports on spending and evaluates if people are managing projects correctly, if accounts make sense, and other indicators of fraud.
Ebert said AI helped one police department in Indiana to help solve 10- and-20-year-old cold cases. Before using AI, the department would sift through thousands of pages of reports and information every year to try to solve cold cases.
Using AI technology, the department found one minor detail connecting multiple reports that was used to reduce the subject pool, Ebert said.
“Dozens of officers having looked at had never made that connection before because there was just such a large volume,” he said.
AI can get things wrong and needs to be checked by experts
AI technology is not perfect and can often make mistakes.
Berk said if a large language model —an AI algorithm trained on large amounts of data like ChatGPT— is trained on bad data, it won’t perform well.
Thomas said his agency always has an analyst evaluate the data the AI tool has used.
“AI can’t stand by itself. It absolutely has to be reviewed by somebody who has specific knowledge in the type of investigation that you’re doing,” Thomas said.
Some law enforcement agencies have reported issues in integrating AI technology.
In one example, integrating AI into forensic fingerprint identification practices faced many challenges, according to the Homeland Security Affairs journal. These challenges centered on dataset bias, lack of algorithmic transparency and challenges with explainability, the journal said.
Sarah Lapidus covers southern Arizona politics and issues for The Arizona Republic. Reach her at sarah.lapidus@gannett.com.
