In echoes of Minority Report, the British government is working on a “murder prediction” tool aimed at identifying individuals who are most likely to become killers, the Guardian reported this week.
The project — originally called the “homicide prediction project” but since renamed as “sharing data to improve risk assessment” — is being run by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice and uses algorithms and personal data, including from the Probation Service, to make its calculations.
The government said that the project is currently for research purposes only, and will “help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence.”
The work was launched under the previous Conservative administration and is continuing under the Labour government, which took office last year.
Civil liberty campagin group Statewatch discovered the project’s existence through a Freedom of Information request.
Sofia Lyall, a researcher for Statewatch 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.”
She said that the tool will “reinforce and magnify the structural discrimination underpinning the criminal legal system,” adding: “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.”
Lyall called on the government to “immediately halt further development of this murder prediction tool.”
The concept of using algorithms to predict potential killers is prominently featured in Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella Minority Report, later adapted into the hit 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise. In this fictional universe, so-called “PreCrime” officers use psychic mutants (“precogs”) to arrest individuals before they commit murders, representing an early exploration of predictive policing. However, in this case, the story employs precognition rather than traditional algorithms.
Back in the real world, predictive policing is known to be used by a number of police departments in the U.S., though its adoption faces growing scrutiny and regulatory challenges.