The UK government is working on a new program, aimed at predicting possible criminals capable of committing serious crimes. The program, ‘Murder Prediction’, will already use people’s data with officials to identify people with high risk of becoming a killer.
The Ministry of Justice (Moj) said that the project will help improve public safety using algorithms to analyze many people’s data. The government will identify patterns and risk factors to predict and prevent serious crimes.
Although the government hopes that research will help in the justice system, critics argue that this may cause privacy violations.
UK -based Civil Rights Group, Statwatch said that data will also be collected for those who have not committed any crime, Mentor Informed It said that officials will use sensitive information as they have gone to the police for help or have ever been self-loss or are involved in domestic misconduct.
Sophia Lyal, a researcher at Statewatch, criticized the project, described it as “chilling and diastopian”. He said, “This is the latest model, which uses our institutional racist police and home office data, will strengthen and enhance structural discrimination that outlines criminal legal systems.”
He said that like other systems of its kind, it would be a code in bias towards racial and low -income communities. He said, “It is deeply incorrect to manufacture an automatic tool to profile people as violent criminals, and using such sensitive data on mental health, addiction and disability is highly infiltrated and dangerous.”
The government claimed that the project would use the data of at least one criminal decorated people.
So far, the initiative is in the research phase and has not yet been kept in practice, it has been said.
Critics fear that the data being used may result in improper bias, especially against poor people and ethnic minorities.
According to the MoJ, the program was launched under former Prime Minister Rishi Sunkh and “will check alternative and innovative data science techniques to assess the risk of murder” and “review criminal characteristics that increase the risk of killing.”
The project is being organized only for research objectives, the ministry said. This is designed using the existing data organized by the police forces on HM gel and probation service and guilty criminals to help us better understand the risk of people on probation to commit serious violence.