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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Social media ads promoting small boat crossings to UK to be banned
Ministers are to outlaw social media adverts promoting journeys on small boats across the Channel to asylum seekers. The government will create a UK-wide criminal offence that could lead to perpetrators being sentenced for up to five years in prison and a hefty fine. Though facilitating illegal immigration is already a crime, the change will make it a specific offence to create material for online publication that promotes or offers services that would lead to a breach of UK immigration law. This includes advertising small boat crossings, selling fake passports, visas and other travel documents, and promoting opportunities for illegal work in the UK. Ministers will make the change via an amendment to the border security bill, which is making its way through its final stages in the House of Lords. Eighty per cent of migrants who arrived in the UK on small boats told government officials that they had used social media during their journey, including to locate or communicate with people smugglers, according to Home Office data. The department said it wanted to crack down on smugglers selling a false narrative about life in the UK to desperate asylum seekers by criminalising those promising illegal work online. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said: 'Selling the false promise of a safe journey to the UK and a life in this country – whether on or offline – simply to make money, is nothing short of immoral. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion 'These criminals have no issue with leading migrants to life-threatening situations using brazen tactics on social media. We are determined to do everything we can to stop them – wherever they operate.' The change will also make it a crime to post online content that encourages someone to break UK immigration law in exchange for money. Rob Jones, the director general for operations at the National Crime Agency (NCA), said: 'We know many of the people-smuggling networks risking lives transporting people to the UK promote their services to migrants using social media. The majority of migrants arriving in the UK will have engaged with smugglers in this way.' The NCA has taken action against organised crime groups using social media to promote crossings, including a south Wales-based gang convicted in November 2024 after smuggling thousands of people across Europe. The gang used social media videos posted by people who had made successful crossings to promote the service. Another network operated by the Preston-based smuggler Amanj Hasan Zada, who was later jailed for 17 years, also posted videos of people thanking Zada for helping them. There have been cases of Albanian people smugglers who have used social media to promote £12,000 'package deals' to get to the UK including accommodation and employment, which will also fall under the scope of the new law.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Notting Hill carnival machete attacker jailed for 18 years for attempted murder after he launched himself at teenager and slashed open his stomach
A teenager will spend 18 years behind bars after he attacked a stranger with a 10-inch 'zombie knife' at Notting Hill Carnival. Rumarni Tuitt, 19, from Walthamstow, north-east London, stabbed 18-year-old Kamani Spooner with the deadly weapon on the evening of August 24 last year. He was found guilty of attempted murder back on May 8 following a two-week trial at the Old Bailey. Sentencing him on Friday, Judge Judy Khan KC said it was a 'brutal and wholly unjustifiable attack and that there was no justification for carrying a knife of that nature on to crowded streets. 'This was a particularly serious offence committed in the heart of Europe's biggest street festival,' she added. In a witness statement for the police, Mr Spooner said he spent much of the day drinking with his friends and enjoying the carnival before the horrific assault unfolded. 'Towards the end of the carnival, he [Mr Spooner] could hear shouting coming from somewhere and he realised he was somehow in the middle of it,' prosecutor Mark Paltenghi told jurors. 'He then saw people fighting around him - three of them were quite close, they were throwing punches. 'He then recalls being hit in the back and upon looking at his arm, saw it had been cut, then looked down and saw that his intestines were hanging out. He put his hand over them and just ran. Mr Tuitt also stabbed Mr Spooner four more times to the side and the back and caused a laceration to his right forearm. Officers arrested Mr Tuitt immediately after the attack and were able to provide vital medical treatment to his victim until paramedics could reach them. Despite having his stomach sliced open, Mr Spooner miraculously survived his injuries thanks to life saving surgery. The zombie-style knife used, described by police as 'at least 10 inches in length', was recovered from the scene. 'Zombie-style' is the street name given to weapons which are over eight inches in length and often have a serrated edge, spikes or more than two sharp points. During his trial in May, the court heard that Mr Tuitt and Mr Spooner did not know each other. Mr Tuitt said that he was acting in self defence but the jury rejected his claim. Acting Detective Inspector Sophie McLoughlin, who led the investigation, said: 'This was a savage and senseless attack. The victim was very lucky to survive his injuries. 'Hundreds of thousands of people, including the victim in this case, go to Carnival to have a good time and enjoy the music and entertainment. 'Those who would choose to turn up armed with a 10 inch zombie knife clearly have no such intentions. 'It is thanks to the vigilance of officers on duty that day and the hard work of my team in the months since that we were able to build the case that saw Tuitt convicted at court. 'It is also thanks to officers' immediate medical intervention at the scene, as well as the specialist further care by paramedics, that we're talking about a conviction for attempted murder and not worse. 'I hope the victim can now move forward and begin to put this experience behind him.'
