The Government has developed a ‘murder prediction’ programme using personal data to identify offenders most likely to become killers.
The secretive project, run by the Ministry of Justice, uses algorithms to analyse thousands of criminals in the UK to determine which pose the greatest risk of committing serious violence offences.
Department heads hope it will boost public safety, but civil liberty campaigners warned it was ‘chilling and dystopian,’ with echoes of sci-fi thriller Minority Report, in which police predicted crimes and arrested suspects before they were committed.
The existence of the programme, which was initially named the ‘Homicide Prediction Project’ but renamed ‘Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment,’ was discovered by pressure group Statewatch via a series of Freedom of Information requests.
The MoJ has insisted that the programme exclusively uses data from offenders with at least one conviction and is for research purposes only, with no immediate impact on operational decisions.
The project was commissioned by the prime minister’s office during Rishi Sunak’s tenure and analyses data from before 2015 using official sources including the Probation Service, Scotland Yard and Greater Manchester Police.
The MoJ said the scheme will ‘review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide’ and ‘explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide.’
It pointed out that police forces and the Probation Service already used similar risk assessment tools, and the purpose of the project was to see whether combining data sources would improve accuracy.
Minority Report (2002) stars Tom Cruise as a ‘Pre-crime’ police chief who arrests suspects based on the visions of three clairvoyants
The plot hinges on an elaborate plan to trick the pre-crime system in order for a killer to get away with murder
Campaigners warned that systems for predicting crime were ‘inherently flawed,’ as illustrated by the 2002 Stephen Spielberg blockbuster Minority Report, in which a system that predicts murders before they happen is manipulated to protect a killer.
Statewatch researcher Sofia Lyall said: ‘The Ministry of Justice’s attempt to build this murder prediction system is the latest chilling and dystopian example of the government’s intent to develop so-called crime “prediction” systems.
‘Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for “predicting” crime are inherently flawed. Yet the government is pushing ahead with AI systems that will profile people as criminals before they’ve done anything.’
Ms Lyall warned that the system would code in institutional bias towards racial minority and lower-income communities, and called for the government to halt the project and invest in supporting welfare services.
The personal data used includes names, dates of birth, ethnicity, gender and police national computer identification numbers, Statewatch reported.
Interim director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, Rebecca Vincent, also called for the ‘dangerous’ programmed to be scrapped immediately.
‘We know that algorithms can get it wrong, that AI can get it wrong, and that police themselves can get it wrong, even when crimes have already taken place – they must not be allowed to use pervasive technology to target innocent people who have not committed any crime,’ she said.
‘The privacy implications are enormous, representing a human rights nightmare reminiscent of science fiction that has no place in the real world, and certainly not in a democracy.
‘This dangerous programme should be immediately scrapped and should never see the light of day.’ A spokesman from the MoJ said: ‘This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence.
‘A report will be published in due course.’
