Revealed: The Minority Report police project that aimed to predict which drivers would kill

Police aimed to mine criminal and traffic data to predict which drivers would be the most dangerous - and most likely to kill on the roads in future.

The project was called “An Algorithmic Approach to Targeting Risky Drivers” - and details released to the Herald show its aim was to reduce the road toll because “conventional prevention activities … may be approaching a limit”.

Set up in 2021, the project was shut down after two years, bringing to an end the Minority Report-style aim of predicting who among us would be the most dangerous drivers.

In Minority Report, a hit movie starring Tom Cruise, a futuristic police force used technology to identify who would commit murders in future - and then imprisoned them so they couldn’t enact the crimes.

Before it was shut down, the project found six per cent of crashes resulted in deaths and serious injuries, yet caused disproportionate and “significant levels of harm within communities and whānau”.

It found serious crashes persisted despite advances in road engineering and technology “suggesting driver behaviour remains a significant contributor towards (death and serious injury) events”.

The project plan said police held extensive data that could be used to prevent serious crashes “through the targeting of risky driver behaviours”.

By studying the data police held, it said, it could identify relationships between crash history, criminal offending and traffic offending “and build algorithms to identify drivers that are high risk”.

The police document showed the plan aimed to build on a Western Australia policing tool that had been found to have “methodological shortcomings”. It was intended that in a New Zealand context, it would have “a more rigorous model development, testing, and implementation framework”.

The Minority Report movie showcased a future policing system in which people were arrested before they committed a murder. Photo / Supplied

The report said police intended to study and cross-check road infringement data and criminal histories of those involved in crashes that caused death or serious injury.

This would involve the technical challenge of “attempting to train algorithms to classify rare events”.

In sketching out a plan, the report’s author said 10 years of serious crash data would provide the starting point for the dataset.

Factors that would be studied - but weren’t necessarily indicative - included prior criminal and traffic offending, reoffending, age and other factors.

An email released to the Herald under the Official Information Act from Inspector Pete Jones, road policing insights manager, said “nothing was actually developed into a usable form to enable it to be trialled”.

He said those involved had since left the police.

Police acting director for data and performance Zane Kearns told the Herald that work on the project was “overtaken by other priorities” and those involved were folded into the new data and performance directorate in police. He said “This work is not identified on any current work programme”.

University of Otago Professor James Maclaurin - whose expertise included ethical questions around artificial intelligence - said the document appeared to set out a process for police that was appropriate.

The halt could also have come down to police crunching data and discovering that what it had was “not very predictive”, he said.

The police hypothesis was that past behaviour could offer an insight into future risk. Photo / Bevan Conley

Maclaurin said the broad sweep of data required would likely have included those who were not a risk on the road. Another possible reason for the project not advancing was the findings could have been “unfair or intrusive”.

He said the project document included reference to the “algorithm charter for Aotearoa New Zealand” to which police became a signatory in 2020. The document acknowledges this and its “public commitment to be transparent and accountable in the use of algorithms and to ensure that such technologies are applied ethically and responsibly”.

He said the charter came with particular responsibilities for signatories, including speaking to those whose data was to be used. In some sense, he said the charter was “pretty restrictive” which might have posed a barrier to advancing the project.

“The Minority Report idea that we can tell where the next murder will happen isn’t there.”

In Western Australia - which served as a forerunner for the New Zealand project - drivers were sent targeted letters warning that they had been identified as risks on the road, and explaining why.

The letter included the line: “A review of your driving record indicates that you are at an elevated risk of causing serious injury or death to yourself or other road users.”

In that case, triggers included motorists found to have a record of two of the following: speeding; careless or dangerous driving; drug and alcohol-affected driving; drivers not paying attention by, for example, using mobile phones or following too closely; or being unlicensed.

David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.