Risk Assessment Tools in Policing Contexts: 10 Key Ethical Challenges

Risk assessment tools are increasingly used in policing to enhance decision-making accuracy and objectivity; yet their implementation has raised significant ethical concerns regarding issues of bias, transparency, and governance.

This paper examines the ethical complexities of risk assessment tools through an analysis of four instruments: the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), previously developed and used by Durham Constabulary; the Active Risk Management System (ARMS), used across all police forces in England and Wales; the Offender Assessment System (OASys), used to profile risk of reoffending by probation services in the UK; and the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), a widely researched tool deployed in US corrections contexts whose ethical challenges are directly relevant to tools now entering policing practice.

A thematic framework identifies 10 key challenges for the field, including disparities in accuracy metrics, fairness trade-offs, bias linked to demographics and social identity, and retraining. The paper contextualises these issues within influential roles, including tool developers, decision-makers, and oversight committees. The credible risk of ethical harms arising from the use of risk assessment tools underscores the need for rigorous validation, transparency, and adaptive governance to minimise these risks.

This paper arises from a meeting of an interdisciplinary working group convened at Ethox, University of Oxford, comprising academics in philosophy, law, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology, as well as police stakeholders.