The Homicide Prediction Project — the UK Ministry of Justice's Secret AI Risk-Profiling Tool

Documents obtained by Statewatch through freedom-of-information requests revealed that the UK Ministry of Justice, together with the Home Office, Greater Manchester Police and the Metropolitan Police, developed the 'Homicide Prediction Project' (later renamed 'sharing data to improve risk assessment'), intended to identify people considered at risk of committing homicide from government and police records.

The stated aim was to build a predictive tool from shared government and police data, drawing on sensitive indicators such as mental-health history, addiction, self-harm and suicide risk, vulnerability and disability, to flag individuals as being at risk of committing homicide.

A Data Sharing Agreement with Greater Manchester Police shows that records on between 100,000 and 500,000 people were shared to build the tool, and Statewatch obtained the Data Protection Impact Assessment and an internal risk assessment via freedom-of-information requests after the project had not been proactively disclosed.

No independent evaluation of the tool's predictive accuracy or false-positive rate has been published; following press coverage in April 2025, the Ministry of Justice said the project was research rather than an operational tool.

Campaigners and legal experts criticised the lack of prior disclosure, the use of protected health characteristics as predictive inputs, and the absence of published independent evaluation - concerns that echo separate, published findings that the ministry's long-standing OASys reoffending-risk tool, used in over 1,300 assessments a day, shows lower predictive validity for Black, Asian and Mixed-ethnicity offenders.