Why the police should use machine learning – but very carefully

The debate over the police using machine learning is intensifying – it is considered in some quarters as controversial as stop and search. Stop and search is one of the most contentious areas of how the police interact with the public. It has been heavily criticised for being discriminatory towards black and minority ethnic groups, and for having marginal effects on reducing crime. In the same way, the police use of machine learning algorithms has been condemned by human rights groups who claim such programmes encourage racial profiling and discrimination along with threatening privacy and freedom of expression. Broadly speaking, machine learning uses data to teach computers to make decisions without explicitly instructing them how to do it.