Just the UK government “creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill”.
Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.
The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.
The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.
It is currently for ‘research only’… but how many more fairy steps is it to seeing this kind of pre-crime predictor being used to pre-punish people through algorithmically interconnected systems around insurance, hiring, reference checks for rental, or even school applications?
Look into a population of prisoners and you’ll see massive over-representation of those with poor levels of literacy, with poor mental health and with early experience of trauma and the care system.
Perhaps rather than fund magic algorithms to predict who might commit violent offences, more money should be poured into reducing inequality? Someone should send them all a copy of Wilkinson and Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better…
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