Artificial Intelligence (AI) is redefining the way we do things, but none of it reflects the dystopian worlds we see in movies and TV series. However, that may soon change as the United Kingdom government now wants to use the technology to create interactive crime maps that will help “predict where offences are most likely to occur.”
The announcement sounds straight out of the popular dystopian science fiction thriller Minority Report, where John (Tom Cruise) works with the PreCrime police to stop crimes before they occur using three “PreCogs”, who can foresee crimes.
In a press release, the UK government said the Technology Secretary Peter Kylethe, the detailed real-time interactive crime map will span across England and Wales and will help “detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot anti-social behaviour early on” to give the police a head start and intel ahead of dangerous situations.
Part of the Safer Streets Mission, the AI-powered, real-time interactive crime map is aimed at tackling crime in urban areas. The UK government will be making an initial investment of £4 million for the prototype model, which is expected to come out in April 2026.
Under the £500 million R&D Missions Accelerator Programme, the UK government wants a fully functional system by 2030. Designed to focus on crimes that “make people unsafe” in their own neighbourhoods from theft, anti-social behaviour, knife crime and violent crime, the system will help aggregate data shared between police, councils and social services by analysing “previous incident locations and studying the patterns of known offenders.”
The map will help the police officers identify areas where the crime rate is high and deploy resources as added to prevent future crimes. The use of AI might sound like science fiction, but similar initiatives in other parts of the world have had mixed results.
For example, predictive policing tools used in Los Angeles and Chicago were decommissioned after they were accused of racial bias and had limited success. Another predictive software project named Geolitica (previously called PredPol) was discontinued in 2020, after its effectiveness was cited as uncertain.
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However, the Crime Anticipation System (CAS), a project in the Netherlands, has seen modest success in terms of burglary rates. The Danish police have also successfully used AI systems to help with fraud investigations.
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