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Police in Durham will trial an artificial intelligence system (AI) to judge the risk of suspects re-offending.
The AI will help custody sergeants decide whether suspects should be sent into the criminal justice system.
It has been called the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) and will be launched within the next three months, Durham police told Sky News.
It will classify the suspects as either low, medium, or high risk of reoffending, contributing to whether they are released or remanded in custody.
A scientific randomised trial of the forecasts found that only 2% of low-risk suspects turned out to be at high-risk of reoffending.
However, it also found that 12% of those forecast as high risk turned out to be low risk.
HART was developed by Dr Geoffrey Barnes in a partnership between Durham Constabulary and the University of Cambridge's Centre for Evidence-Based Policing.
Professor Lawrence Sherman, the director of the centre, told Sky News that, with budgets for the Crown Prosecution Service and magistrates' courts being "slashed", it was an important economic requirement for police to identify when to keep suspects out of the criminal justice system.
"What the algorithm does is allow the police to make evidence-based decisions," said Professor Sherman.
Asked if he was concerned about the 12% of low-risk suspects that were wrongly identified as high risk, and thus more harshly treated than they might have been, Professor Sherman said: "Not at all.
"This is totally transparent science.
"The hypothesis that we want to test will clearly have a result in showing whether the algorithm made the decisions better or worse."
Professor Sherman said he was concerned about whether incorrect decisions resulted in damaged lives, but stressed: "We don't know if the current system could be damaging lives."
(SKYNEWS)
