The UK Government is developing a pre-crime ‘murder prediction’ programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers. The Guardian has more.
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.
Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.
The Government says the project is at this stage for research only, but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions against minority-ethnic and poor people.
The MoJ says the scheme will “review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide” and “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide”.
The project would “provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis”, a spokesperson added.
The project, which was commissioned by the Prime Minister’s office when Rishi Sunak was in power, is using data about crime from various official sources including the Probation Service and data from Greater Manchester police before 2015.
The types of information processed includes names, dates of birth, gender and ethnicity, and a number that identifies people on the police national computer.
Statewatch’s claim that data from innocent people and those who have gone to the police for help will be used is based on a part of the data-sharing agreement between the MoJ and GMP.
A section marked: “type of personal data to be shared” by police with the government includes various types of criminal convictions, but also listed is the age a person first appeared as a victim, including for domestic violence, and the age a person was when they first had contact with police.
Also to be shared – and listed under “special categories of personal data” – are “health markers which are expected to have significant predictive power”, such as data relating to mental health, addiction, suicide and vulnerability, and self-harm, as well as disability.
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Pre Crimes the Next Tyranny
8 days late? Perhaps the G has production problems; it would have made sense on 1/4, after all.
They should change the name once more to:
Sharing Archives To Improve Risk Evaluation.
The revised name comes with its own handy mnemonic.
The most scary bit here is acutally that our officials are stupid enough to believe this is possible. Especially, this includes being ignorant enough about pretty basic math to believe that the relative frequency of a non-random past even equals the probability of it repeating in future.
Despite being taught in GCSE Maths in the UK, the False Positive Paradox (aka Base Rate Paradox) still does not gel with most people, including ignorant officials. A highly relevant example of the paradox can be found by googling for “Base rate fallacy Example Terrorist identification”. (Ironically, Google’s AI introduction summarises this!)
The idea behind this is much more f***ed up. A probability is the relative frequency a specific outcome of a random selection will approach if the random selection is repeated often enough. The usual simple example is rolling a dice. Each individual outcome as a probabilty of ⅙ and this means there’ll be approximately n/6 occurences of each number when a dice has been rolled n times. The actual number of occurences will converge towards n/6 as n increases.
Relative frequencies can obviously be calculated whenever there’s a group whose members have a property X and a subgroup whose members also have an unrelated property y but the y/x is not the probability that the next person with property X will also have property Y as there’s nothing randomly selected here.
We don’t know what the outcome will be is a necessary condition for a random selection process but it’s not a sufficient condition: Just that we don’t know why something occurred doesn’t mean something occurred randomly.
Mathematical de-nonsenifying: Let nx be the number of people with property X and ny the number of these people with property y. ny/nx is know the relative frequency of number of people in the property X group which also have property Y but not the probability that the next person where property X is observed will also have property Y.
Good example – I like the example around tossing a coin – many people believe after a series of one result, you are more likely to get the opposite, when in reality it’s basically still 50/50 because each event is separate
This is actually not true because the probability of an event occuring is the number of times “event occurs” in the total set of events divided by the total number of events. When tossing a coin once, the total number of possible outcomes is 2 (front or back) and both front and back thus have a probability of 0.5 of occuring. But when tossing a coin twice, the total set of possible outcomes is
This means the individual probability of each outcome is now only 0.25. The number of possible outcomes doubles with each toss of the coin. But a sequence of all front or all back always remains only one of the possible outcomes. This means the probability of it decreases exponentially with the number of coin tosses.
Here we go again! Matt Hancock allegedly based his strategy to
control everyonecontain a ‘deadly, killer virus’ after watching the film ’Contagion’.Who has now been watching Tom Cruise in Minority Report?
Perhaps anyone that has should be subject to a double eyeball transplant without being told that it only works in the pretend world of Hollywood.
They’d need a brain transplant first
*For those who haven’t seen the film, Cruise plays a cop who, after being assessed by an AI pre-crime programme, is falsely accused of a pre-crime. He has to fight the system to clear his name.
Dear Mr Smith,
Our algorithms detect that you are more likely than average to commit murder, and so we need to talk to you about your thinking, and enrol you in our Homicide Awareness Course. You should report to Blogtown Community Centre next Monday at 6.30pm, bringing this letter and a utility bill with you as evidence of eligibility.
Failure to complete this course may make you liable to summary arrest in front of your children, 48 hours in our cells, and then release on Police Bail followed by a “no further action” notification, as is usual in non-crime situations.
If you belong to any of the following Protected Categories, you may ignore this letter…
I’m surprised that there is no mention of ‘number of years residing in the UK’ as one of the predictive variables.
So the algorithm might not work very well if they don’t include all the variables that correlate strongly with crime.
They can’t help themselves can they.
They’ve never seen a dystopian film or book without thinking “ooh that’s a good idea, we’ll try that”.
Truly we are governed by moral and intellectual pygmies.
“Explore alternative and innovative data science techniques…“
…Meaning find new ways of making stuff up. Outcome life sentence for the heinous pre-crime of predicted premeditated homicide.
Elementary, my dear Two-Tier.
Just another excuse to pry into private citizens and then control them. But it is all protect the individual. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin I believe.
Its been said before, but 1984 was not intended as an instruction manual.
“Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.” Like they denied the introduction of vaccine passports and look at what happened…..
This appears to be largely a re-run of the Home Office Initiative around 2001 (under various “Blair Babe” focus groups, presumably led by Jack Straw). This reached the level where the Home Office tried to get national and international definitions of mental illness changed to introduce a new one: “Severe and Dangerous Personality Disorder” (SDPD). This was defeated, not so much by human rights activists and lawyers, but by psychiatrists, doctors, medical professionals, researchers and, above all, mental health practitioners. On the whole these did not want the responsibility for “diagnosing” the politically-motivated new disorder of SDPD, especially as such a diagnosis would, under the Home Office proposals, render the person immediately liable to indefinite detention without charge, simply on the basis of a couple of opinions of psychiatrists. Also it tended to work the opposite way to that recommended by psychiatrists dealing with this type of case: namely, instead of encouraging the patient to take responsibility for their own actions, it would have specifically removed that responsibility from the patient and transferred it to the doctor, or the medical facility. As well as being psychiatric bad practice, it would have placed doctors and anybody else in a position of responsibility in a situation where they would be fearful of the consequences of NOT making such a diagnosis if the patient then went on to commit murder; such fear would tend to make the person adopt the contentious “precautionary principle” and make a SDPD diagnosis, knowing that they would not be held responsible for any violation of the patient’s human rights.
Twenty-five years later, what has changed? First, the government of the day still seeks votes by appearing to be able make the electorate “feel” safe from the extremely small number of people who pose a risk to the general public, while playing down the much larger risk of the much larger number of essentially basically harmless people, who happen to tick all the “right” boxes in the opinion of psychiatrists, being detained indefinitely. (It’s the old False Positive Paradox again, which came to fore during Covid testing.) Secondly, AI has come along, or whatever small development in software and hardware has been thus dubbed. This will encourage even more dependence on “computer says” diagnoses, based on even more obscure algorithms and models of human behaviour. The potential for unscrupulous, incompetent or merely mistaken people (whether entrepreneurial, medical, political, legal or social) to cash in on this, and the resulting human rights violations, will be enormous.
However, there will be opposition. One obvious tactic will be to point out that “psycho-eugenics” would be tainted by bad history, because it comes out of the same stable as eugenics, the difference being that eugenics was about extirpating carriers of “defective” genes, whereas psycho-eugenics is about extirpating carriers of “defective” memes. Another defence is the lessons from the psy-ops applied during Lockdown detecting people who might be labelled as potential “granny killers” just because they up-ticked a comment sceptical of the value of Lockdown and vaccination.
I hope this research does not result in the roll-out of an “early intervention” programme to stop crime before it occurs: the lessons of the 2001 Blair/Straw research must surely be available.
Scary!
“‘Murder Prediction’ Tool to Identify People Most Likely to Kill” Lite woke version no doubt.
The pre-crime tool will of course work only in identifying white people, any other person ethnic or sexual protected status will be filtered out.
I wonder if it could have predicted the Nottingham and Southport murders? It’s funny how all the layers of ‘experts’ couldn’t, yet the man on Clapham Omnibus would have done this in 5 secs.
This is just another boondoggle for the useless Home Office and MoJ.
At which university is this “research” taking place?
The Odeon or Cineworld.
Ha-ha! Brilliant!
Algorithm is:
white?
male?
not in trade union?
heterosexual?
not disabled?
score 2 or more positive answers to get arrested.
The biggest problem with this approach is not that it might identify those most likely to kill people but that following that identification nothing will be done.
Potential murderers will no doubt claim a right to enjoy a family life under the EHCR which trumps the ‘identification by algorithm’.
You don’t seriously want people to be punished for some AI claiming they might commit a crime in future with a certain probability, do you? If you do, why not just send people to prison street-wise? Some of them would certainly have committed some crimes otherwise! Or why not just gather people at random and shoot them?
Nice one. That’s a quote to remember:
“Why not just gather people at random and shoot them?”
Is this the real reason Stalin Starmer is so keen to force schoolchildren to watch that Marxist Indoctrination programme called “Adolescence”???
Softening up the public with propaganda, so they will accept White Working Class Boys as the primary targets of the “Pre-Crime Murder Prediction Tool”???
TPTB: We think you’re likely to commit murder so we have you under round-the-clock observation.
Subject: !! I’ll ****ing kill you. Make sure they get it on camera.
I presume this will only be deployed against white British people ….. since they know who the most likely to murder are and they all have various shades of darker skins and have come here from places where violence, particularly against women, is the norm and often sanctioned by their faith and their governments.
it was known at least thirty years ago that there are typically 39 to 39 antecedent criminal events prior to the major ‘index event’ such as murder, rape, etc and that the obvious job of the ‘relevant authorities’ was to work on the perpetrator during the first batch of criminal acts to prevent the probability of the major incident – but, as ever, the bureaucrats and politico’s ignored the research … no wonder we’re ‘at’ where we’re at