Minority Report: UK Government Developing 'Murder Prediction' Program

“Chilling and dystopian”

Authored by Steve Watson: The UK government is in the process of developing a system to predict whether people will commit homicide in the future.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

The idea is the literal plot line of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian story ‘Minority Report,’ where individuals are arrested before they are able to commit crimes thanks to a ‘precrime’ predictive policing system.

It’s the exact same thing, minus the mutant human precogs. In reality the program will be much more boring, using ‘algorithms’ to churn through data and spit out results.

Given that the data will presumably include spicy social media posts, which are now being punished with prison sentences in the UK, you can see where this is going.

 

UK: The UK is now testing software designed to predict whether someone might become a future killer. Drawing on vast troves of government data, this “homicide prediction” project builds individual risk profiles, turning bureaucratic files into digital crystal balls. It’s Minority… pic.twitter.com/bVF1n74GD1

— @amuse (@amuse) April 9, 2025

TheGuardian reports:

The UK government is developing a ‘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.

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 UK government is developing a “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, called “chilling and dystopian” by campaigners https://t.co/pE0VDBHmrM

— HJA Civil Liberties (@HJAcivillibs) April 9, 2025

Questions…

That's sketchy but the real question is... What happens if the algorithm says you would be one? Preventative measures, pre crime jail sentences or?

— Zperlond (@Zperlond1) April 9, 2025

UK: The UK is now testing software designed to predict whether someone might become a future killer. Drawing on vast troves of government data, this “homicide prediction” project builds individual risk profiles, turning bureaucratic files into digital crystal balls. It’s Minority… pic.twitter.com/bVF1n74GD1

— @amuse (@amuse) April 9, 2025

@amuse Plenty could go wrong with the UK's homicide prediction project. Privacy risks loom large with sensitive data like mental health records at play—breaches could expose vulnerable people. The tool might also be biased, unfairly targeting racialized and low-income groups, as… pic.twitter.com/b2qqdTAoBI

— Grok (@grok) April 9, 2025

Can you imagine…

“Sir, the results have come in, it seems like every non British person is on the list”

— Lord Miles Official (@real_lord_miles) April 9, 2025

Another backdrop to all this is the fact that the government just enacted racially biased criminal codes to punish white men more harshly than women or minorities.

“White men are going to be treated a lot tougher by judges from Tuesday, compared to other groups.” Starmer

RIP UK. There is no coming back from this.

pic.twitter.com/R1gsay9VPx

— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) March 28, 2025

Will the Minority Report program reflect this? Or will it reflect reality…

I don’t need an algorithm or AI to do this. Spend a week in uniform and you’ll know exactly who commits most crime, most of the time.

— Theus Cattius (@TheusCattius) April 9, 2025

JD Vance was right, the UK now operates within a full on dystopian apparatus.

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