TL;DR: The UK government announced £4 million to build an AI-powered "interactive crime map" to predict criminal activity before it happens.[1][2] Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood explicitly compared the vision to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a prison where inmates are watched constantly.[3] Prototypes are expected by April 2026, with full deployment by 2030.[1][2] Big Brother Watch calls it a "frightening expansion" of surveillance powers that undermines the presumption of innocence.[2] Meanwhile, a police chief just resigned after his force used a Microsoft Copilot search to justify a policy based on a match that never took place.[3][5]
The Home Secretary Said The Quiet Part Out Loud
Usually, government officials try to avoid dystopian framing when selling surveillance programs. Not Shabana Mahmood.
The UK Home Secretary explicitly invoked Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an 18th-century prison design where guards could observe all inmates without them knowing whether they were being watched. The psychological effect of potential constant surveillance was the point.
"The eyes of the state can be on you at all times," Mahmood said, speaking to the Tony Blair Institute. She said she wanted to achieve "by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon."[3]
The story was written by Philip K. Dick and adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 2002. Now it's UK government policy.[3]
What They're Building
The initial £4 million investment is part of the larger £500 million R&D Missions Accelerator Programme. Here's what's planned.[2]
- Interactive crime map: Real-time tracking and prediction of theft, anti-social behavior, knife crime, and violent crime across England and Wales[1][2]
- Data fusion: Combines information from police, local councils, and social services to identify where crime is likely to occur and to spot early signs of anti-social behaviour[2]
- Video search AI: Tool that finds suspects in hours of CCTV, mobile phone footage, or doorbell camera footage, speeding up video search by 60 percent and already being tested by two police forces[1]
- Risk identification: College of Policing CEO Sir Andy Marsh said predictive policing could be used to identify "the 1,000 most dangerous men who pose the highest risk to women and girls in England and Wales"[1]
Prototypes by April 2026. Full operational system by 2030.[1][2]
College of Policing CEO Sir Andy Marsh laid out the strategy: "Our job is to test the ones that work properly, test them with rigorous evaluation, and then spread them like wildfire through policing." Police chiefs are currently evaluating around 100 AI projects out of 1,400 "innovative practices."[1]
The Problems They're Ignoring
Conservative MP David Davis cut through the PR: "If an AI system deems you to be at risk of committing a crime, how do you go about proving the AI is wrong, and you pose no threat? The impact on your life when falsely accused of something is enormous."[3]
This is the fundamental problem with predictive policing. You're not responding to crimes. You're preemptively targeting people based on algorithmic guesses about future behavior.
Davis also pointed out that predictive algorithms create a "postcode lottery of justice, reinforcing existing biases and inequalities. Infusing those systems with AI will only exacerbate the injustice."[3] If you live in an area with historically high crime rates, the AI will flag you more often. Not because you've done anything, but because of where you live and who your neighbors are.
Meanwhile, 94% of crimes currently go unsolved, Davis said, urging the government to focus on neighbourhood policing instead.[3] The official figures tell the same story. In the year ending March 2026, 40.9% of victim-based offences were closed because no suspect had been identified.[9] The police aren't solving existing crimes. They want AI to predict new ones.
Civil Liberties Groups Sound the Alarm
Big Brother Watch called the plan "a frightening expansion" of surveillance powers, warning that:[2]
- It undermines the presumption of innocence
- It expands state monitoring into new areas
- It embeds historical policing bias into algorithmic decisions
That last point is critical. The AI learns from historical policing data. If police have historically over-policed certain communities, the AI will identify those communities as higher risk. Bias in, bias amplified out.
Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former director of Liberty, described facial recognition and predictive technologies as "incredibly intrusive" and warned deployment moves the UK closer to "a total surveillance society." She stressed the urgent need for legal frameworks before further rollout, frameworks that don't exist.[2]
The AI Already Failed Spectacularly
Here's the timing: The UK government announced this predictive policing expansion the same month that Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands Police, resigned over an AI failure.[6]
The force banned Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a football match against West Ham. Their justification? Intelligence about anticipated disorder at previous matches.
The problem: That intelligence was wrong. Inspectors found the report contained a claim that "the most recent match Maccabi Tel Aviv played in the UK was against West Ham United in the UEFA Europa Conference League group stage on 9th November 2023". There was no such fixture. The Chief Constable told inspectors the force did not use AI tools, and confirmed that at the Home Affairs Committee on 6 January 2026. A different West Midlands Police interviewee told inspectors the erroneous statement was the result of a search the force carried out using Microsoft Copilot, and described it as "an AI hallucination".[5] The force initially said the intelligence had been gathered from Google searches, then admitted officers had relied on the Microsoft chatbot.[3]
This is the foundation they want to build predictive policing on.
The US Tried This. It Didn't Work.
Predictive policing isn't new. US cities have experimented with it for years. The results aren't encouraging.
A randomized controlled field trial of predictive policing across seven US police departments found that patrols based on analyst predictions "showed no significant effect", while patrols driven by a statistical forecast model cut crime volume by an average of 7.4 percent.[8]
PredPol is the most-cited example. It was one of three vendors in an NYPD predictive policing trial, and the Los Angeles Police Department ran two programmes of its own, one of which "calculates 'hot spots' with a high likelihood of property-related crimes". The Brennan Center's review notes that the LAPD programme known as LASER was shut down in 2019 after an internal audit found "inconsistences in how individuals were selected and kept in the system", and that some police departments have discontinued their PredPol programmes. It also warns that relying on historical crime data "can replicate biased police practices and reinforce over-policing of communities of color".[7]
The UK is repeating mistakes the US already made.
What You Can Do
Contact Your MP
The Technology Secretary and Home Office are pushing this without meaningful parliamentary debate. Your MP can raise questions. WriteToThem.com makes it easy.
Support Civil Liberties Groups
Big Brother Watch, Liberty, and the Open Rights Group are actively fighting these expansions. They need funding and public support.
Follow the Implementation
April 2026 prototypes mean this is happening now. Watch for pilot programs in your area. Document police AI use. Request information under FOI about what your local force is testing.
Sources
- UK Home Office explores policing with AI - Biometric Update (Jan 19, 2026)
- UK government to use AI to predict crime before it happens - National Technology
- ‘Achieving The Panopticon’: UK Police Forces to Trial Minority Report-Style AI Predictive Policing - Breitbart (Jan 20, 2026)
- Why ‘Predictive’ Policing Must be Banned - Open Rights Group (May 1, 2025)
- Inspection of police forces’ contributions to safety advisory groups: West Midlands Police - HMICFRS (Jan 14, 2026)
- Maccabi football fans and the ousting of a UK police chief: why it matters - Al Jazeera (Jan 19, 2026)
- Predictive Policing Explained - Brennan Center for Justice (Apr 1, 2020)
- Randomized Controlled Field Trials of Predictive Policing - Office of Justice Programs (2016)
- Crime outcomes in England and Wales: 2025 to 2026 - Home Office (gov.uk)