Smart policing refers to the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to enhance policing activities in terms of crime prevention or crime reduction. Artificial intelligence tools, including machine learning and natural language processing, have widespread applications across various fields, such as healthcare, business, and law enforcement. By means of these technologies, smart policing enables organizations to efficiently process and analyze large volumes of data. Some examples of smart policing applications are fingerprint detection, DNA matching, CCTV surveillance, and crime prediction. While artificial intelligence offers the potential to reduce human errors and biases, it is still essential to acknowledge that the algorithms reflect the data on which they are trained, which are inherently collected by human inputs. Considering the critical role of the police in ensuring public safety, the adoption of these algorithms demands careful and thoughtful implementation. This paper presents a systematic literature review focused on exploring the machine learning techniques employed by law enforcement agencies. It aims to shed light on the benefits and limitations of utilizing these techniques in smart policing and provide insights into the effectiveness and challenges associated with the integration of machine learning in law enforcement practices.

In the face of rapidly increasing crime rates, the evolving complexity of crime data processing, and public safety challenges, the need for more advanced policing solutions has increased leading to the emergence of smart policing systems and predictive policing techniques. This urgency and shift toward smart policing incorporates artificial intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on machine learning (ML) as an essential tool for data analysis, pattern recognition, and proactive crime forecasting. Among these, the flexibility and power of AI techniques including large language models (LLMs), as a subset of generative AI, have increased the interest in applying them in real-world applications, such as financial, medical, legal, and agricultural applications. However, the abilities and possibilities of adopting LLMs in applications including crime prediction remain unexplored. This paper focuses on bridging this gap by developing a framework based on the transformative potential of BART, GPT-3, and GPT-4, three state-of-the-art LLMs, in the domain of smart policing, specifically, crime prediction. As a prototype, diverse methods such as zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning are used to comprehensively assess the performance of these models in crime prediction based on state-of-the-art datasets from two major cities: San Francisco and Los Angeles. The main objective is to illuminate the adaptability of LLMs and their capacity to revolutionize crime analysis practices. Additionally, a comparative analysis of the aforementioned methods on the GPT series model and BART with ML techniques is provided which shows that the GPT models are more suitable than the traditional ML models for crime classification in most experimental scenarios.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, BERT, and Llama, has introduced a new era in natural language processing (NLP) as they have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks. Fine-tuning these LLMs with domain-specific data has become a popular practice, particularly in domains like education, law, medicine, and software development. This process not only empowers LLMs with domain knowledge but also enhances their capabilities by addressing issues such as reliability and reducing the chance of hallucination. This survey examines a range of domain-specific fine-tuned models by highlighting their unique characteristics, enhancements in performance, and the challenges they address, including the demand for extensive computational resources. Furthermore, we explore the fine-tuning methodologies, including instruction tuning used in the development of these models, and ultimately, inform future research on the existing gaps and how to enhance the effective application of LLMs across diverse domains.