BRITISH cops are using a system to stop crimes BEFORE they happen.

Police in Durham are employing artificial intelligence designed to help officers decide whether or not to keep a suspect in custody.

2 Samantha Morton starred in Minority Report, playing a woman who had pre-cognitive abilities and could predict crimes before they happened

Dubbed the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), it predicts the risk of the suspect re-offending by categorising them as low, medium or high risk.

The force says the system is due to go live in the next few months, and could be picked up elsewhere in the country before the end of the year.

HART is a system developed by University of Cambridge Professor Dr Geoffrey Barnes in a partnership between Durham Constabulary and the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Evidence-Based Policing.

2 Tom Cruise as John Anderton using an eye scanner device in Minority Report scene

It is designed to forecast the risk of a suspect re-offending by putting them in either a low, moderate or high risk category.

The system recalls the film Minority Report, in which cops are able to predict crimes and arrest people before they take place.

Sheena Urwin, head of criminal justice at Durham Constabulary says that ‘high risk’ would be committing a serious offence over the next 24 months, ‘moderate’ would be a non-serious offence over the next 24 months and ‘low’ is no further offending over 24 months.

The AI will be used by custody officers when deciding whether to keep a suspect in custody for a few more hours, whether to release them on bail before a charge, or whether to remand them in custody after a charge has been made.

It will also help the officer decide whether an offender is eligible for the Checkpoint programme if they are low risk.

Checkpoint is an alternative to prosecution which offers eligible offenders a four-month long contract with interventions to address the underlying reasons why they committed the crime, such as employment or housing issues.

Ms Urwin is keen to stress that HART will not be automatically used to decide whether someone is released or remanded, but will be one of several factors custody officers will consider when making a decision.

How does the crime prediction system work? The system uses 34 different predictors to put someone in one of the three categories - including age, gender, postcode and intelligence count.

The majority of the data it uses is based on the suspect’s previous history of offending.

The system has been trained on five years of offending histories data.

If someone has no history of offending they are likely to be classified as ‘low risk’.

Race is not used as one of the factors in making a forecast.

The system is incredibly efficient - it takes 11 seconds to make a prediction, helping save time for officers.

But it is also hoped that by putting low risk offenders into the Checkpoint programme it will help reduce re-offending, and the number of future victims of crime in the process.

Ms Urwin said tests are currently being carried out into whether Checkpoint has been successful into preventing criminals reoffending, and that the results were “promising”.

Data for HART was taken from Durham police records between 2008 and 2012.

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The system was then tested during 2013, and the results - showing whether suspects did re-offend or not - were monitored over the next two years.

A scientific randomised trial of the forecasts made by Hart found that only two per cent of low risk suspects went on to commit a serious offence.

But it also found that 12 per cent of those forecast as high risk turned out to be low risk.