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UK Creating 'Murder Prediction' Tool To Identify People Most Likely To Kill 172

New submitter toutankh writes: The UK government is developing a tool to predict murder.

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 uncovered by Statewatch rather than announced by the UK government. PR following this discovery looks like uncoordinated damage control: one stated goal is to "ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis", but a spokesperson also said that it is "for research purpose[s] only". One criticism is that such a system will inevitably reproduce existing bias from the police. What could go wrong?

UK Creating 'Murder Prediction' Tool To Identify People Most Likely To Kill

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  • Pre crime (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:02PM (#65291095) Homepage Journal
    n/t
  • by VampireByte ( 447578 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:06PM (#65291101) Homepage

    Murder won't be the endgame. After a few months the precogs will also be used for predicting who is going to make an "offensive" social media post.

    • Nah, your paranoia has it backwards. The more likely scenario is that offensive social posts will be used to predict whether someone is likely to commit a crime.

      • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @10:29PM (#65291237)

        No. Offensive (to the current regime) social media posts will be the crime.

        • And like that, the evil has changed from being purely self-actualized evil, intentions to cheat us, steal from us, and enrich themselves, to saying bad things about the evil ones who do not care one bit about us.

          Or, more accurately, fearing that the truth will tear from them the privilege and power they have enjoyed for so long they believe it is their right to rule.
           

      • by JeffOwl ( 2858633 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @11:04PM (#65291281)
        This is from the UK and social media posts are already getting people arrested there. And no specific threat is required.
        • Doesn't even take a social media post in the US. How quickly we forget. A mere 4 months ago https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com] a woman was arrested for using delay deny depose in a phone conversation. How that is a threat, but trump years ago saying he could kill someone on 5th avenue and nothing happen is the mystery.
      • by cstacy ( 534252 )

        Nah, your paranoia has it backwards. The more likely scenario is that offensive social posts will be used to predict whether someone is likely to commit a crime.

        Why are you casting this as though it will be an idea in the future? This has been the practice for many years now. (Though they do wait for some other excuse to arrest them.)

        Yes, there is already a file on you.
        Yes, AI is involved.
        Assuming you use a telephone or the Internet.

        • honestly
          this is really hopeful and optimistic of you

          The truth is that there's more data than they know what to do with and no amount of AI will resolve the agency issue. This kind of thinking leads you down the path of accepting that the spooky government has magical ways of knowing things that you can't possibly know about... which not only isn't true, it's a device to prevent you from reacting to things.

          At best they can store it and comb through it when they know what they're looking for, but even then no

    • I don't need a precog or an AI / ML algorithm to predict who is going to make an offensive social media post. It is obvious enough as is.
    • Companies will use it to determine who to hire. Maybe even have it at store entrances to stop people likely to shoplift.

      • by cstacy ( 534252 )

        Companies will use it to determine who to hire. Maybe even have it at store entrances to stop people likely to shoplift.

        Companies already delve into your Internet life to decide whether you are a good candidate.
        And people are already stopped from entering places (such as football stadiums and government offices) based on individualized profiling - they see you coming on the facial recognition and intercept you at the door/gate.

  • by Gideon Fubar ( 833343 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:11PM (#65291111) Journal

    Pity it's going to cause the police to be unfairly prejudiced against people for reasons that make no sense whatsoever and are wholly artifacts of dataflow and fit.

    • That's a feature, not a bug.
      Like K9 drug dogs that have been trained to "detect drugs" whenever their handler signals them to, the point is not detection but plausible deniability for the human.
      Of course this AI will precisely reflect the unfair biases of police officers, that is likely the entire point.
      Now when officers racially profile and generally act the same bigoted way they always have, they have a defense against ever being accused of such because "the program picked out the suspects, I was just do

      • There was a case about a decade ago in an area near me.
        Police tried to claim their contact database justified their harassment of a group of kids because it showed that they had a higher incidence of contacts with these kids, by demographic... And even after getting a statistician in to explain to them the difference between their contacts and the (lack of) conviction rate associated with those contacts (both in terms of data being available, and later when the data showed that the group were actually less

    • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @10:22PM (#65291229) Journal

      Pity it's going to cause the police to be unfairly prejudiced against people for reasons that make no sense whatsoever and are wholly artifacts of dataflow and fit.

      Oh come on, surely the software will be perfect and bug free.

    • So, kind of indistinguishable from the police?

    • So no real changes then.

      You can predict by Zip code people who end up in prison. It's where the police presence is, and where they treat crime SERIOUSLY.

      It's a self reinforcing statistical pipeline from grade school to juvenile detention.

  • by Morromist ( 1207276 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:20PM (#65291129)

    I'm always amazed at the UK folks who never stop increasing the power of their surveillance state, are absolutely terrified of... knives and the murder rate in the UK is less than half of the overall rate of Europe and about one-sixth of the rate in the United States, yet their fear and desire to give up their rights to be safer continually seems to be increasing.

    And, as much as I dislike a huge amount of stuff about the USA, I would rather live in a country with 6x the murder rate than a country where everyone is so spineless. What would your viking ancestors say?

    • when people don't bother to file a crime anymore because the police in the UK just looks away all the time as we have seen with all those Pakistani rape gangs.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @11:30PM (#65291305)
        So every year crime goes down. And every year the Publix perception of crime goes up. So every year the public throws more cops at the problem that doesn't exist.

        Those cops are expected to do a job. They aren't just sitting around they're expected to bring arrests in. That means they're going to start finding criminals one way or another. You can already see it with things like cops busting into homes for fake welfare checks and pulling over people for any old thing so they can drag them downtown for an arrest. And they're just aren't enough minorities to go around keep all these cops employed harassing them
        • I'm not sure how true any of that is. Even in my, generally safe, generally affluent, bit of the UK, hundreds of crimes go uninvestigated, much less unsolved because of lack of resources. If we had a whole load of cops sat around doing nothing, they'd surely be able to look into those "small" crimes such as industrial scale fly-tipping, theft of tools from work or industrial sites and other such things.

          Where your statement *is* true is the City of London. There, a load of cops are responsible for about a sq

      • Jimmy Saville was British and not of Pakistai descent. Also despite the sheet scale of crime he was actually a single person, it was a person's name, not the name of a rape gang.

    • Spineless you say?

      So how are yoh calling this when a country's police force is so much scared shitless and adopts a continuous fire-first-as-questions-after attitude that they invented the term SWATTING? And that one of the greatest threats you can express towards a person is a "welfare check" from local law enforcement?

      • America sucks too, it just sucks less at this particular thing, and yes, our police are definitely cowards.

        • It does not suck less on this regard. Bad as the police in the UK are, they are much much worse in the US, being a major tool of oppression. You know you have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, certainly of any major country. Freedom doesn't count for shit if you are in prison or dead.

          • It does not suck less on this regard. Bad as the police in the UK are, they are much much worse in the US, being a major tool of oppression. You know you have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, certainly of any major country. Freedom doesn't count for shit if you are in prison or dead.

            To be fair, the incarceration rate in the UK would be higher if they didn't keep letting people out of prison early because they've run out of space.

            • Yes if we keep more people in prison, we would have more people in prison.

              Kind of a tautology don't you think? The UKs prisons are overcrowded because we subscribe to the anglosphere ideals of punishment (with America being the extreme case), which is both expensive and of dubious effectiveness. Comparable countries manage to lock up fewer people without being overrun with crime.

              • It's more "If the UK could have more people in prison, they would have more people in prison". Incarceration stats in the UK are depressed by the fact that they simply do not have the capacity to lock up all the people that the justice system wants to.

                It's the distinction between "If I ate another candy bar, I will have eaten another candy bar" and "If I had another candy bar, I would eat another candy bar".

                • Oh right, sure. The conservatives are fans of locking people up but they don't like paying for anything that their buddies came profit from and Starmer occasionally had an idea but is so shit scared of the fault mail that he regrets back to whatever the Tories do anyway.

    • Spineless would be if they disagreed and yet did not dare to voice a concern. But according to the studies, the UK public actually supports videosurveillance in public spaces.

      An overwhelming majority (86%) of those surveyed said they supported its use. The main reason cited being 'because it helps prevent crime' (74%). https://synecticsglobal.com/Co... [synecticsglobal.com]

      • You are just describing two different forms of cowardice. Just because the British lack the decency to be ashamed of their cowardice does not make them any less cowardly.

  • by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:26PM (#65291141)

    Minority report mention. These people are idiots. There are a lot of people that act weird, but what ends up happening is you start throwing random people in jail.

    • Ideally, this would go to Asimov, not minority report. All the Troubles in the World, 1958
      The critical difference is the idea that by preventing the crime the supercomputer Multivac predicted, there didn't need to be punishment for the crime.
      Basically, after the prediction an agent would be dispatched to follow the potential killer around, and stop the murder. After that, there were intervention services that would reduce the likelihood of a repeat.
      We've already found things like treating violence, includ

    • A new, well-written novel that covers this is The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2025/0... [nytimes.com]
      https://www.penguinrandomhouse... [penguinrandomhouse.com]
      https://www.kirkusreviews.com/... [kirkusreviews.com]

  • by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:27PM (#65291143)
    When will people understand, the quality of the output is reliant on the input. If this was strictly for research, they wouldnt be doing it.
  • It might be more useful to have a predictive tool to identify people most likely to BE murdered.

    Just saying.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Usually the same people who would do the killing. They just didn't get their knives, guns, clubs out fast enough.

    • Re:Better idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:51PM (#65291183)

      Go look up the murder reports for Chicago's triangle area. Note the times and the description of who shot who under what circumstances.

      When I used to check every week when Chicago was the murder capitol of the US, they were almost entirely drug deals gone bad and 2am party shootings. Plus the street level assassinations where some drug pusher got a bullet in the back of the head from "unknown assailants" at 3am on a street corner.

      Take all those out of the murder stats and the murder rate drops like a rock.

      You don't need an AI to tell you that drug dealing gang bangers are going to drop like flies every Friday and Saturday night in most major cities.

  • and they will be locked up with out an trial!

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @09:54PM (#65291187)
    That blame knife stabbings on the knife, are working on a prediction tool.

    So the same people that blame Islam extremism on The FerrrrrAAaaaArRRRrrrrR Right, are working on a prediction tool.

    So the same people that pulled rape allegations out of their ass in regards to Russel Brand's activity over 30 years ago, because he's put a spotlight the fuckery of the Global Scum-Class... But yet completely ignore DECADES OF CHILD RAPE from Pakistani Grooming gangs and Pedo-Police... Are working on a prediction tool.

    So the same people that just voted down a bill, that would have looked into the DECADES OF CHILD RAPE BY Pakistani Grooming Gangs and Pedo-Police, are working on a prediction tool.

    So the same people that are going to use Netflix's complete work of fiction *Adolescence --which doesn't remotely resemble reality, as a teaching tool, are working on a prediction tool.

    So the same people that just arrested 12000 Brits for their opinions on Social Media, giving them longer sentences than violent sex offenders, are working on a prediction tool.

    *If you don't know, Netflix roughly based this show on a kid named Axel Rudakubana... But his upbringing and background do not fit their fucked in the head made up worldview.

    The UK's government is a cesspool of authoritarian nonces.
    • Adolescence (Score:4, Informative)

      by ZiggyZiggyZig ( 5490070 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @04:08AM (#65291643)

      Adolescence was definitely not based upon Axel Rudakubana's [wikipedia.org] story. As far as we know, Rudakubana never made statements endorsing male supremacy, never hinted about self-identifying as an incel, and never made statements about hating girls.

      The worldview depicted by Adolescence is not "fucked in the head made up", it's a real thing that happens in class everywhere (to a less extreme extent, we don't hear about murders every day). Of course you can keep your head in the sand when this does not fit your narrative of "it's those pesky *cough*muslim*cough* foreigners who do all the crime". Here's a nice example of French schoolboys making and circulating p*rn deepfakes of their female classmates (source in French national newspaper, SFW) [liberation.fr]. This is in rural France, not a part already "invaded" by "foreigners". Those are nice, Catholic white boys creating naked photos of their girl classmates and circulating them over the internet because they're girls and they, as boys, hate them. Their worldview is very close to the one depicted in Adolescence, I can tell you. But sure, you can conveniently look away.

    • Anonymous Coward. The name says it all.

      Thanks for your contribution Russel.

      Whats more likely a drug addict's half baked conspiracy theory or a self confessed celebrity sex addict with woman chucking themselves at him got a bit carried away and a bit rapey while he was stoned?

  • by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @10:00PM (#65291199)
    What we need is a murder prevention tool. Such as cops actually on the street. Instead of spending all day on the top floor of city hall. In the free restaurant.
  • Obesity. I mean what a fucking stupid excuse to trample on basic human rights when there are bigger problems that can actually be solved.

    (American here. I'm not throwing stone when I live in a glass house. I'm warning everyone to not be stupid fascist like us. )

  • The worst part of this is what if it actually works? What if lots of data and testing showed that it actually could predict the likelihood of a given person to commit murder?

    On one hand, it would be great to prevent murders (duh).

    On the other hand, this would give every government the perfect reason to go for full-on, dystopian-level social monitoring, all in the name of 'public safety'.

    And it's not even that the 'predictobot' algorithm could or would be wrong, but the powers that be could claim their magic

    • It will most likely work in a significant percentage of the cases in hindsight, because murder is a rather extreme measure and to be driven to one should be statistically detectable.

      And that will justify its forward-looking application, which, for it to "work" should fail 100% :)

    • I say, move it back to childhood. We ought to be doing the Stanford marshmellow test on kids as a standard to identify children who need some extra attention to help with self-control.

      You don't look for murderers to put under constant surveillance, you try to ID at-risk kids and help them not be at-risk. It's better for everybody, including the kids.

      • Yeah uh

        this is a really good reason to not do it.
        Not only does that test not show what you think it does, there's no demonstrated correlation here between 'a lack of self control' and the act of murder. I can see how what you're saying seems to make sense, but even in that conceptualization it can't be an exhaustive explanation (and you'd just end up, as others have hinted here) punishing poor kids for being poor.

        • What a sad world you live in where someone can say, "identify and help kids with impulse control issues" and you jump right to assuming it means "hurt poor kids".

          "Help" has a dictionary definition.

          • by tragedy ( 27079 )

            What a sad world you live in where someone can say, "identify and help kids with impulse control issues" and you jump right to assuming it means "hurt poor kids".

            I know it's not what you meant, but that's actually literally right. It is a sad world. There are way too many real world examples of "identify and help X" that end up being "hurt X" in the real world. Basic examples include identifying areas for extra policing based on number of police interactions in an area, which leads to more police interactions, which leads to more policing. Pretty much inevitably that leads to walking around on the street in those areas essentially becoming a crime. Examples abound,

          • A well-meaning progressive administration can collect data with the intent of helping people. This could be used by a regressive administration to hurt people. Any kind of list that identifies people personally that could be use for harm needs to be protected by laws and processes. Or an automatic hammer that smashes the hard drive it's stored on.

      • For the most part, I agree with the other posters who have refuted your post. But as a funny thought experiment that demonstrates how unreliable psychological tests in general are, consider the following:

        Using your logic, if failing to demonstrate self control and future planning means we have to intervene to ensure they have self-control as an adult, then demonstrating self control and future planning in the marshmallow experiment is even worse! That suggests they might be future serial killers, sociopaths

    • Philosophically irrelevant. A future murder is not equivalent to a past murder. Even if you are 100% certain that a person will commit murder, you don't know which murder or who. Who knows, their future victim could die from other cause before the murder.

      • I don't disagree.

        But again what if, regardless of that potential uncertainty, it turned out that it really could spot likely future murderers?

        It's unsettling on multiple levels if you think about it...are we really that simplistic that some of our behavioral paths could be that predictable?

    • The worst part of this is what if it actually works? What if lots of data and testing showed that it actually could predict the likelihood of a given person to commit murder?

      What does that even mean? What is the "likelihood" of any individual committing murder and how would you evaluate it with data and testing?

      Its fine to say the population of gangs members includes more people who will be victims of being killed and more people who will kill people than people who are not gang members.. But there are thousands of gang members who will do neither. Their individual "likelihood" was zero.

      • What does that even mean? What is the "likelihood" of any individual committing murder and how would you evaluate it with data and testing?

        Well the usual way to test it would be to let it make its predictions over some course of time and then see how often it was "right".

        In other words, did the people it picked out go on to commit murder after being tagged as likely offenders?

        Maybe that's too simple of a test but it seems like that would work.

        • Well the usual way to test it would be to let it make its predictions over some course of time and then see how often it was "right".

          You mean "whether" you were right. We are talking about individuals. They either murder someone or they don't. How often they murder someone is irrelevant.

          • You mean "whether" you were right.

            Whatever. It's a distinction without a difference.

            • Whatever. It's a distinction without a difference.

              No its not. One suggests probability which is the attribute of a population of outcomes. The other is a certainty, the individual either committed a murder or didn't. As an example, when you flip a coin there is a 50-50 chance it will come up heads. But once it lands it is either heads or tails.

    • So, you must be guilty of something...

      And there lies the truth: "We don't want to do our jobs to correct injustices. We just want to collect the paychecks for showing up and putting more asses in prison." Pretty much the end game of every society's police once the societal corruption sets in.

      Why? Because after the corruption sets in, the police are forbidden from doing their jobs by the very criminals they were meant to protect society from. Throwing the real criminals in jail becomes a new crime of the highest order. (You dared to question

  • > “Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed."

    Sure, which is why we can use this to justify the need for MORE surveillance, more data logging, more facial recognition, etc -- to improve the data and refine the algorithm! /s

    • algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed."

      Lets be clear "inherently flawed" means just that. The flaws are inherent with the concept. Like a perpetual motion machine.

  • How does it decide who to kill?
  • ... come out within the top 5 of key factors, correct? I won't get more specific.

  • by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:50AM (#65291735)

    If you are female and you run this check, an honest, proportional response would focus on your family. And while it's absolutely true, this is a case where cognitive dissonance should remain, lest the fabric unravel.

  • For the sake of the argument let's assume we have two groups, A and B, both with protected characteristics but with an unequal representation of crime rates, say, Ra and Rb, where Ra > Rb.

    If we assume that a model is trained on unbiased, diversified training data and the model starts noticing that Ra is greater than Rb, and therefore group A is more likely to commit a crime, is it bias or a valid statistical correlation?

    The world is not a statistically uniform event space and it's simply too convenient t

    • If we assume that a model is trained on unbiased, diversified training data and the model starts noticing that Ra is greater than Rb, and therefore group A is more likely to commit a crime, is it bias or a valid statistical correlation?

      The problem here is that a lot of statistical methodologies are rooted in the "science" of eugenics. There is good reason eugenics is now recognized as a pseudo science, but science hasn't shaken off all of its racist driven illogic.

      Example of the logic: Group A is 10 people in a bar one of whom is Bill Gates. The second is a group of people in bar B that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The people in Bar B are twice as likely to be billionaires as the people in Bar A. So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are t

  • They'll run the scripts through the tool to make sure the plots aren't too predictable. https://midsomermurders.fandom... [fandom.com]

  • Because the surest way for me to be a candidate needing to go on the list, is if I go on the list. Chicken or egg. No list, no threat.

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