Labour wants to use 'Minority Report' AI to predict murder. This could have chilling consequences

Imagine hearing a loud knock at the door in the early hours, and outside there are two police officers waiting to say: “Excuse me sir, our AI tool has predicted you are a future murderer, so you need to come with us.”

If this sounds like a sci-fi plot, it already is – to the excellent Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. But, if the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has its way, science fiction could become reality in the UK.

The MoJ has quietly been working on a model designed to predict who is likely to commit murder. It is not the only ‘high tech’ data model to predict crime the MoJ is developing – but the murder-specific predictor could have the most chilling consequences.

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Although the government claims that this is a trial, and that it is not informing operational policing, Whitehall would not develop a tool like this if it never had a plan to deploy it.

This murder prediction tool is not the first attempt to roll out predictive policing in the UK. Durham Police tested a recidivism tool half a decade ago… but trying to predict killings is a horrifying escalation.

Predictive policing is an idea that should strike fear into the heart of anyone who thinks the principle of innocence until proven guilty should be the cornerstone of our justice system. How would the police intervene if you were slated by the AI system as a nailed on murder-in-waiting? By putting you under 24/7 surveillance to keep an eye or even by locking you up ‘preventively’ just in case?

There are already rights issues with the carceral state, before it moves into the territory of pre-crime. Suddenly conviction by a jury of your peers would not be the only justification for removing basic liberties, but instead they could be stripped on the whims of a machine that brands you as a threat.

Even if such a system was accurate, punishing someone for what they might do is the antithesis of a democratic justice system. However, predictive policing models have shown themselves to be liable for catastrophic mistakes, riddled with racial bias. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ is a worrying idea when AI makes minor predictions, when deciding who might be a killer the flaws are only magnified.

Any system would necessarily be based on existing government datasets, and would therefore reflect any biases contained within them. These datasets are not complete, begging the question – would the MoJ be happy to make predictions based on limited data, or would a system of total surveillance be required to make sure that the model was as accurate as possible.

Either option is fundamentally incompatible with human rights and would force the UK to choose between near-guaranteed miscarriages of justice or living in a total surveillance state.

At the moment, data law in the UK makes it difficult for any meaningful decision to be taken solely by a machine. A human in the loop is a requirement. Reforms are being pushed through by the government, with parts of the Data Use and Access Bill that will take the police off the leash when using AI to make decisions about people’s lives. Law enforcement will be given a carve out from the limited protections against automated decision making that will survive the bill, raising the terrifying spectre of a machine deciding whose doors police should knock on the next morning.

There is a world of difference between researching why people kill, and predicting who is going to kill.

Getting under the skin of what drives somebody to take a life – the socioeconomic factors, the failings in the justice system and the personal ‘reasons’, unjustified as they will be – could provide insights to inform the policymaking needed to shape society into a place where the risk of future killings drops dramatically.

On an individual level, human behaviour is far less predictable and there can only be danger when the state ventures into fortune telling.

Getting it wrong would destroy fragile trust in the justice system, and would either see the state at fault for not preventing deaths, or wrongfully depriving innocent people of their liberties – and there is no question that flawed predictive policing would get it wrong. Human behaviour is not deterministic, and flawless prediction of who will commit a crime is in the realm of sci-fi, not reality.

Minority Report remains a great film, but it was not a blueprint for policing. The MoJ must not reach for dystopian fiction as a handbook for the future.

Jake Hurfurt is head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch.

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