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Thursday 4 December 2008

The nightmare of ‘pre-crime’

The nightmare of ‘pre-crime’ is already with us

Police can now act against people who have done nothing

Dick, who died on 1982, has only posthumously received the recognition that his themes warranted. Many of his science fiction novels and short stories have since become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, but it is the main theme of Minority Report — a 1956 short story that in 2002 became a Spielberg motion picture — that should really concern us. For this futuristic cautionary tale predicted the notion of pre-crime.

In Minority Report mutants, or ‘pre-cogs’, are able to predict a felony that will be committed in the near future, and the police (or in the original story, a government department) therefore have to find, apprehend and punish the person who is going to perform the crime. It was a nice, if absurd, conceit. Yet the fact that it is now being implemented (minus the mutants) as government policy is not only absurder still, but positively alarming

Under legislation that came into force in August, police in England and Wales will now have the power to ban from town centres those who are thought likely to be troublesome drinkers. The ‘directions-to-leave orders’, which last for 48 hours, apply not to those who have drunk anything, but to those who police believe are about to start doing so. Those breaching the order or failing to comply can be arrested or fined up to £2,500.

This is just the latest raft of legislation implemented by a Labour government that, as a consequence of its attempts to invert the principle of innocent until proven guilty in so many spheres of public policy, has now seemingly assumed the power of clairvoyancy. For instance, in June a leaked document from the Home Office recommended that council staff, charity workers and doctors tip off police about individuals they believe might commit a violent crime. Like the ASBO, introduced in 1998, no firm evidence is required for those making the accusation, merely the hearsay or opinion of those doing the snitching. In March the Home Office made the proposal that every child in Britain be screened to assess how likely it is that he or she will become a criminal. The idea is that by taking into account such things as school marks, truancy rates and substance abuse, you can see if an 11-year-old child will grow up to become a murderer. Adults might now find themselves on a government list of pre-criminals. Five London boroughs have already started to use a database that profiles high-risk ‘future offenders’ as part of a pilot scheme for a nationwide database. The aim is to give the police a list of the 100 most dangerous potential offenders, based on psychological profiling.

More articles from: Patrick West | this section

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