Jun 25, 2026 6:00 AMAs UK police embrace the AI revolution, a WIRED investigation reveals the messy inside story of one region’s experiment with predictive analytics.Photo-Illustration: Lena Weber; Getty ImagesThe Think Family Database holds records on close to half a million people who live in the city of Bristol, England. For many years, few of them knew anything about it.Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information—police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a “picture of threat, harm, and risk” in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: “I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody.”This risk scoring inside the Think Family Database was just one part of Avon and Somerset Police’s sprawling predictive analytics program. Among at least 23 separate models the force created were algorithms to identify the risk that people would commit burglary, fail to turn up in court, go missing, or become a victim of domestic abuse. One senior officer described creating a “league table” of the area’s most dangerous criminals—an apparent reference to the Offender Management App, which was designed to hold data on around 300,000 people in the region.John Pegram says he wants police to scrap the Offender Management App.