A WIRED investigation has revealed that England's Avon and Somerset Police built and ran at least 23 crime-prediction models on a database covering roughly 500,000 residents, with some later judged "not fit for operational use" and shut down.
June 25, 2026 · WIRED Investigation
Britain's Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine
For nearly a decade, Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council pooled the records of roughly half a million people into machine-learning models scoring residents for risk — until some were quietly abandoned in 2023 over "genuinely poor" accuracy.
~500K
residents' records in the Think Family Database
~30
data sources integrated — police, council, housing, health, education
23+
machine-learning models scoring risk
36K+
performance scores disclosed — some "genuinely poor"
Inside the Offender Management App
One Qlik Sense tool held data on ~300,000 people and assigned risk scores to ~170,000 of them over six years.
What the models tried to predict
Child sexual exploitation
Criminal exploitation
Domestic abuse victimization
Repeat burglary offending
Court non-appearance
Going missing
Offender management
Variables fed in included school absences, mental health concerns, free school meals and rent arrears — flagged by researchers as proxies for poverty.
The case for
Police and council officials cite a sharper "picture of threat, harm and risk" and greater efficiency — and the program was long seen as a success story.
The case against
Two exploitation-risk models judged "not fit for operational use" and abandoned May 2023. Data pooled without consent; "function creep" and discriminatory profiling flagged.
"Legality is not the same as legitimacy."
The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation warned of "ethical tensions." With the College of Policing now reviewing some 100 AI tools, the open question remains: how to govern a structure where one person can build models affecting hundreds of thousands — under limited transparency.
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