UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

Even though policing department spent 2 years on 'Minority Report' evoking study predicting which criminals will become killers

The UK's justice department has confirmed it is working on developing algorithms to predict which criminals will later become murderers.

It was internally referred to as the Homicide Prediction Project, and was first discovered via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests filed by civil liberties group Statewatch, which uncovered the project. More recently, the study was dubbed "the murder prediction program" by The Guardian, which first reported the story.

Sources told The Register the project is an expansion of existing risk-prediction tools that are already used to predict the possibility of criminals reoffending when approaching prison release, for example. They said this is a long-established practice, with the Offender Assessment System (OASys) one example of this. Introduced in 2001, it uses data to predict reoffending rates and the OAS outcomes inform criminal sentencing and prison block categorizations, with recent research [PDF] stating OASys-linked predictors can be reliable.

Theory or practice?

Critics, however, are concerned that the information used to develop the new "murder prediction" tool includes data on up to half a million people, some of whom are innocent of any crime, and are worried about its potential for bias.

And while officials insist this remains a research project only at present, and claim commentary around the discovery is over-sensationalized, Statewatch says its documents refer to the "future operationalization" of the system.

Statewatch went on to say the documents it obtained – an MoJ Data Protection Impact Assessment, an Internal Risk Assessment and a Data Sharing Agreement with Greater Manchester Police – referred to the MoJ's data science team developing models to understand "the powerful predictors in the data for homicide risk."

The Register has asked the MoJ for comment.

Project involves two largest police forces in the country

The project involves bringing new partners and data streams into the fold to fortify the data used by these models. Data from the MoJ, Home Office, Greater Manchester Police, and London's Metropolitan Police are all allegedly informing new predictors, while West Midlands Police was also approached.

According to Statewatch, types of data the homicide prediction project looks at include those related to: Suspects, victims, witnesses, missing people, people for whom there are safeguarding concerns, and other vulnerable individuals.

The MoJ documents stated that health marker data was expected to give "significant predictive power" to the models, with factors like mental health, addiction, self-harm, suicide, vulnerability, and disability all informing homicide predictions.

Previous data informing homicide predictions, published in 2023 [PDF], looked at data such as ethnicity to predict offending rates. Data from 2020 [PDF] noted that the majority of UK homicide victims and suspects were white.

People of all ethnicities from more deprived areas as well as Black people specifically are "significantly over-represented" in the data the Ministry of Justice holds and used for this analysis of homicide, says Statewatch, which adds that data-driven "predictive" models discriminate against racialized communities, "reinforcing the structural discrimination of the criminal justice system."

Greater Manchester Police's internal data protection impact assessment (DPIA) of the project, obtained by Statewatch, shows the algorithms will incorporate police data such as names, dates of birth, genders, ethnicities, and police national computer (PNC) numbers to produce probabilistic matches. 

It expected between 100,001 and 500,000 records to be processed as part of the project and the data was encrypted at rest and in transfer, and MFA was used to access relevant systems.

Commissioned by Rishi Sunak's government in January 2023, internal project timelines showed the research project was due to end in December 2024, at which point the research data would be deleted and the findings presented to stakeholders.

Statewatch researcher Sofia Lyall said the discovery of the Homicide Prediction Project is "chilling and dystopian."

"Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for 'predicting' crime are inherently flawed," she said. "Yet the government is pushing ahead with AI systems that will profile people as criminals before they've done anything.

"This latest model, which uses data from our institutionally racist police and Home Office, will reinforce and magnify the structural discrimination underpinning the criminal legal system. Like other systems of its kind, it will code in bias towards racialized and low-income communities. Building automated tools to profile people as violent criminals is deeply wrong, and using such sensitive data on mental health, addiction, and disability is highly intrusive and alarming.

"The Ministry of Justice must immediately halt further development of this murder prediction tool. Instead of throwing money towards developing dodgy and racist AI and algorithms, the government must invest in genuinely supportive welfare services. Making welfare cuts while investing in techno-solutionist 'quick fixes' will only further undermine people's safety and wellbeing." ®