Like Minority Report But Make It British

In a bleakly efficient corner of Scotland Yard, the met police has unveiled its latest crime fighting innovation: the Murderbot 3000, an AI tool designed to predict who might commit murder. Based on factors such as social media likes, postcode and if their Nan ever watched dial ‘m’ for murder.

“We are not saying the scum that the algorithm picks out are going to murder”, says chief constable Seymour Bacon. Just that they “fit the vibe”.

The tool uses a black box propriety algorithm based on decades of misogyny and racially biased data, thus ensuring it is cutting edge, and deeply problematic.

In the spirit of big tech, the data used to train the model was extracted from the victims of crime, without their consent. The legality of this, being naturally beyond reproach.

However, despite these minor teething issues. Initial tests were promising, with the algorithm identifying the killer in every episode of Poirot.

Pressed on whether the algorithm would have predicted one of their own would abduct, rape, and murder a young woman, Chief Constable Bacon assured your correspondent there’s “not much you can do about the occasional bad apple.”