Essex Police

Essex Police's privacy notice for the Knife Crime and Violence Model, known through its support programme as Fearless Futures, (version 1.4, dated June 2021) describes a project to assess people at heightened risk of becoming involved in serious knife-enabled violence. It uses police-recorded data from the force's Athena system, processes all Athena data subjects with a home address in Essex, and gives each person a risk score; those at 30 per cent and above are prioritised for allocation to a partner such as the Probation Service under the Violence and Vulnerability Unit. The privacy notice does not list the data items used and appears to give two thresholds (below and at or above 0.3) without explaining how they relate. A College of Policing case study (details accurate as of March 2023) says the model estimates how likely each person known to police is to commit a new knife or violent offence within 12 months, using factors such as age, gender, number of criminal associates and prior suspect or victim status in violence-with-injury cases, was built by Essex Police data scientists with the University of Essex, was tested for 18 months with 'accurate predictions of risk' but no published metrics, and recommends a longer trial in more locations. A force FOI response of 24 February 2022 said the force runs a risk model, Fearless Futures, 'which uses an algorithmic approach to determine risk' and is 'not predictive', and that it has 'no programmes that attempt to predict if individuals are likely to commit crime'; that description sits uneasily with the College of Policing's account of a model estimating the likelihood of new offences, and both are recorded here. Whether the model is in routine use now has not been found, so the status is recorded as a trial.