There was a sorrow incident in Kawasaki, Japan in which a 51 year old Japanese man used a big kitchen knife and wounded 17 people, killed 2 people and right after it the man killed himself. It happened on May 28, just recently.
How can we prevent this type of incidents?
Of course, if we can control everyone’s state of mind in order to prevent it from happening it could prevent. However, as we know it is impossible.
One alternative may be, as we know at home supplies retailers which sell those kitchen knives which could be offensive weapons have surveillance cameras, that the retailers can use those surveillance cameras as Edge Computing devices that accumulate image data, enable Cloud to learn certain behavioral patterns of suspicious shoppers who may commit such a crime and store such behavioral patterns in the database on the edge device in order to match with the real time image data being taken. When the edge device is able to match certain behavior of an individual shopper with the behavioral pattern of potential suspect, then the device will notify the shop owner or the manager.
Of course, there is an issue of privacy in doing so. However, in order to prevent such a life threatening incident from happening before it happens, there should be some trade-off.
We should be careful enough not to have an individual who inappropriately use such a system to have an innocent person to be caught, like in the film “Minority Report” Tom Cruise was featured.