UK Police Going Full Minority Report, Building ‘Murder Prediction’ Tool

In the latest “We have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus” news, The Guardian reports that the United Kingdom government is developing a prediction algorithm that will aim to identify people who are most likely to commit murder. What could go wrong? The report, which cites documents acquired via Freedom of Information requests by transparency organization Statewatch, found that the Ministry of Justice was tasked with designing a profiling system that can flag people who seem capable of committing serious violent crimes before they actually do so. The so-called Homicide Prediction Project (re-named to the “Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment” project so as to not come off as so explicitly dystopian) sucked up the data of between 100,000 and 500,000 people in an effort to develop models that could identify “predictors in the data for homicide risk.” The project includes data from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the Home Office, Greater ... Read full article.