Minority Report reimagined:

How peer-to-peer crime prevention apps can make our cities healthier and safer places to live

Overview

Violent crime costs the UK economy more than £124 billion a year [1]. While predictive analytics has been useful in some cases to predict violent crimes before they occur, these top-down systems are inherently biased against stigmatized populations, and not effective at predicting certain types of crimes such as domestic violence [2]. Alternative bottom-up public health approaches such as community mentoring offer better return on investment, with a benefit of £14 for every £1 spent [3]. Despite this evidence, government investment in public health is falling year on year [4].

One alternative route is to build a social trust programme from the middle-out (i.e., top-down and bottom-up). This could be achieved by establishing a Department of Social Intelligence solely responsible for building a distributed peer-to-peer network of APIs. Provisionally dubbed “StackUK”, this complex adaptive system would enable multi-stakeholders to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens to reduce violent crime. To ensure interoperability, StackUK would need to consist of five bioecological layers that interact and respond to complex changes over time:

1. Micro-system (Digital Avatars): A Future-self Avatar (FuSA) ID would need to be created for every UK citizen. The FuSA would combine biopsychosocial data sets based on consumer habits, personality traits, and social relationships gathered from joint partners. FuSA could then rate the health and social trustworthiness of citizens, which would be stored in a distributed and secure blockchain database. The FuSA ID would then be used to provide citizens access to a range of public services such as healthcare, social support, and electoral voting.
2. Meso-system (Digital Admin): A Digital Admin layer would sit atop the Digital Avatar layer to reduce productivity losses from unnecessary administration. Features may include: 1) a digital safe for every FuSA citizen to ensure their personal documents are secure; and 2) a digital signature to allow citizens to securely sign documents anywhere, anytime. Benefits of a centralized document repository and digital signature are likely to confer considerable savings in both time and materials.
3. Exo-system (Digital Payments): A Unified Payments Interface would sit atop the Digital Admin layer to enable peer-to-peer transfer of money between people. This would enable all transactions to be effectively logged and stored in the digital safe for future access. Recall that the digital safe allows citizens to share a simplified version of these transactions with a requesting provider; e.g., a healthcare service who needs to diagnose and prescribe accurate interventions based on a citizens’ FuSA profile.
4. Macro-system (Digital Consent): A Digital Consent layer would sit atop the Digital Payments layer to empower citizens to grant registered businesses access to their personal data. The consent process could be achieved by either using time-bound and/or ID-verified consent tokens. By building a digital consent-driven world around every UK citizen and giving them the ability to determine how much of their world they wish to share, StackUK would maintain privacy while contributing to ongoing innovation of public services.
5. Chrono-system (Digital Change): A Digital Change layer, arguably the most powerful, would sit atop the Digital Consent layer to enable government to initiate behaviour change strategies for the public good. Behaviour change strategies would use personal insights gathered from the Digital Avatar. Key digital and environmental design features integrating gamification could be deployed to fuel self-awareness, and nudge citizens towards taking positive actions over time that deliver social rewards over penalties.

Potential & Challenges: StackUK’s peer-to-peer network model has the potential to increase social trust and dramatically reduce violent crime at multiple levels of society. At micro levels, Digital Avatars mitigate ID theft and welfare fraud; Digital Admin saves time and money on paperwork. At macro levels, Digital Payments ensure everyday transactions are more secure and transparent; Digital Consent empowers control and innovation over citizen-led data. At the broadest time-based level, Digital Change apps enable government to implement behaviour change apps to nudge people towards habits that provide social rewards. While the cost of building StackUK is likely to reach £25 billion, this figure is less than a quarter of the annual cost incurred by violent crime. Regardless of ethical and political concerns of mandatory ID systems, the cost of not implementing such measures dramatically outweighs benefits to UK citizens and business.

References

[1] Institute for Economics and Peace. (2013). UK Peace Index: exploring the fabric of peace in the UK from 2003 to 2012. Available: http://visionofhumanity.org/app/uploads/2017/03/UK-Peace-Index-report-2013.pdf

[2] K. Lum and W. Isaac, “To predict and serve?,” Significance, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 14–19, 2016.

[3] M. A. Bellis, K. Hughes, C. Perkins, A. M. Bennett, and North West Public Health Observatory, Protecting people, promoting health: a public health approach to violence prevention for England. Department of Health, 2012.

[4] Select Committee on the Long-term Sustainability of the NHS. (2017). The long-term sustainability of the NHS and adult social care. Available: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldnhssus/151/151.pdf