Predictive policing has prejudice built in Letters

Re your article ('Dystopian' tool aims to predict murder, 9 April), the collection and automation of data has repeatedly led to the targeting of racialised and low-income communities, and must come to an end. This has been found by both Amnesty International in our Automated Racism report and by Statewatch in its findings on the "murder prediction" tool. For many years, successive governments have invested in data-driven and data-based systems, stating they will increase public safety – yet individual police forces and Home Office evaluations have found no compelling evidence that these systems have had any impact on reducing crime. Feedback loops are created by training these systems using historically discriminatory data, which leads to the same areas being targeted once again. These systems are neither revelatory nor objective.