Amnesty calls on Heerlen to abandon crime-prediction AI pilot

Amnesty International Netherlands has called on the Municipality of Heerlen to abandon PULSE-TWIN, an artificial intelligence pilot intended to predict crime, nuisance and public-safety risks. The municipality says the project focuses heavily on Heerlen-Noord, where more than 40% of residents feel unsafe, compared with about 14% nationally.

The Municipality of Heerlen is developing PULSE-TWIN with the Dutch national police, Maastricht University and other organisations. It is supported through the European Urban Initiative. The project uses a Social Digital Twin, combining information about the city’s physical environment with social and safety data to identify patterns that could support decisions on neighbourhood safety and liveability.

Amnesty says predictive-policing systems can reinforce existing policing patterns. The organisation says increased surveillance in an area identified as higher risk can generate more recorded incidents there, while activity elsewhere receives less attention. It also says automated risk profiling can reproduce bias in policing data and disproportionately affect lower-income communities and minority groups.

Heerlen says privacy-by-design principles are being included in the pilot, with Maastricht University, an ethics committee and the municipality’s data protection officer involved. The municipality says it plans a Data Protection Impact Assessment and will not automatically continue applications found ineffective or irresponsible. Other European cities are participating as transfer partners considering whether parts of the project could be adapted elsewhere.