Murder Prediction Tool

Can a ‘Murder Prediction Tool’ Identify People Likely to Kill?

May 10, 2025Technology Article

Technology’s use has become more and more useful in countless different aspects of our lives, including many that we don’t even think about. How often do you ponder how satellite navigation works as you drive from one location to another, for example?

When the clocks change in the United Kingdom, do you consider the fact that technology means you don’t have to worry about most of them, with only analogue watches or clocks and the ones on an oven failing to change?

Now, a British company believes it can use technology to work out which people are most likely to kill.

It All Feels Very Sci-Fi

Anyone who has seen the film Minority Report will have the sense that they’ve heard this story before. In the movie, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and was based on a novella by Philip K. Dick, a character played by Tom Cruise works for a specialised police department in the Washington metropolitan area known as Precrime.

Three psychics, known as ‘precogs’, can tell when someone is going to murder someone else before it happens, leading to their arrest before they’ve actually even committed a crime. Some of the technology seen in the film has since proven to be prescient in its nature.

@sasikera #minorityreport #movie #fyp #us #tiktok #samanthamorton #colinfarrell #tomcruise ♬ original sound – sasikera

Little wonder, then, that when people heard about the programme being developed by the United Kingdom government to determine whether someone is likely to become a killer, they compared it to the famous movie.

Obviously, there are numerous differences between how the Murder Prediction Tool would work and how the criminals were identified in Minority Report, not the least of which is the fact that the film had the use of psychics to help in spotting who would go on to murder someone, but the comparisons are clear enough to mean that some people are concerned by what might be coming.

How it Could Work

In some ways, there is little difference between any Murder Prediction Tool and prejudicial assumptions based on how someone looks.

That is thanks to the fact that the Murder Prediction Tool looks at the personal data of people who are already known to the authorities and uses algorithms in order to analyse both the victims of crime and those who have previously committed serious offences so as to work out who might have the personality type to do it in the future.

The programme was discovered thanks to a Freedom of Information Request by a pressure group called Statewatch.

A spokesperson for the government said that the project would ‘provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis’. It was commissioned by Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, who wanted to make use of crime data that was available from numerous official sources.

This includes the likes of date of birth, ethnicity, gender, as well as a number that reveals whether they are on the national police database or not. It will also reveal several ‘health markers’ that it is believed will have ‘significant predictive power’ as to whether someone might become a murderer.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It is fair to say that critics of the programme are concerned about numerous aspects of it. For starters, there is a high chance of such a tool getting things wrong, to say nothing of the fact that it is likely to end up targeting poor people as well as minorities.

One of the researchers for Statewatch, Sofia Lyall, said, “Like other systems of its kind, it will code in bias towards racialised and low-income communities. Building an automated tool to profile people as violent criminals is deeply wrong, and using such sensitive data on mental health, addiction and disability is highly intrusive and alarming”.

She also said, “The Ministry of Justice’s attempt to build this murder prediction system is the latest chilling and dystopian example of the government’s intent to develop so-called crime ‘prediction’ systems. Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.”

It is entirely understandable why people might be more than a little bit sceptical about how a government might use such a machine to ‘crack down on’ those that disagree with its politics, as well as to paint a picture of parts of society that are generally considered to be ‘against’ them.

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