Amnesty says the data driving the predictive systems and assumptions they rely on come from established “racist” police practices such as stop and search, where most stops find no wrongdoing and which overly targets Black people.
A spokesperson for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said: “Policing uses a wide range of data to help inform its response to tackling and preventing crime, maximising the use of finite resources.
That data reflects the structural and institutional racism and discrimination in policing and the criminal legal system, such as in police intelligence reports, suspect data, stop-and-search or arrest data.
The human rights group says predictive policing tools, used by most police forces in the UK, are so unfair, dangerous and discriminatory that they should be banned.
In London, after the Metropolitan police introduced predictive policing in Lambeth in 2020-21, the area had “the second highest volume of stop and search of all London boroughs”, the report says.
