The UK government is working on a “murder prediction” tool that will use the personal data collected about that country’s residents to divine who is most likely to commit murder. Before they do it, obviously.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the whole point of Minority Report, the film based on Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. If you never saw (or read) that one, it deals with so-called ‘pre-crime’, through a justice system that captures and penalises people before any crime takes place.
Anarchy in the UK?
Instead of enslaved telepaths, the UK’s system uses data collected from criminals and victims of crime to attempt identification of people who are more likely to commit violent crimes. The programme, previously known as the “homicide prediction project”, was uncovered by a group called Statewatch.
Statewatch found that the programme, a collaboration between “the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the Home Office, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the Metropolitan Police in London”, collated data from between 100,000 and 500,000 people in its attempt to create a predictive algorithm for violent crime.
UK’s MoJ stated in documents acquired by Statewatch that its aim was to “[e]xplore the power of MOJ datasets in relation to assessment of homicide risk”. An eye toward “future operationalisation” for the programme was also discussed.
It’s not as outlandish as it sounds. The British government already makes use of an Offender Assessment System, another prediction tool whose results are given to judges to help inform sentencing decisions.
There are plenty of reasons for objecting to a system like this, most of which should be obvious. The UK’s program — since renamed “sharing data to improve risk assessment” because that sounds better than “Torment Nexus” — pulls in wide reams of personal data to develop the algorithmic model. This includes data from those not involved in crime either as offender or victim.
There’s also the troubling aspect of being accused of a crime you may or may not commit and having that influence your life. It already does in the case of the UK’s Offender Assessment System, but there are bound to be a few John Allison Andertons caught up in a system like that.
The UK’s Ministry of Justice offered a statement about the program.
“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.”
