Latest news with #precrime
National Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- National Post
Christine Van Geyn: Letting safety override freedom makes us all 'pre-criminals'
In Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, set in 2054, crime has been eliminated thanks to psychics who predict wrongdoing before it happens. 'Pre-criminals' are arrested for 'Pre-crimes' they haven't committed. But the visions are flawed and open to manipulation. The dark side of 'pre-crime' is totalitarianism disguised as public safety. The film is a timeless warning about the tension between liberty and security. Article content Article content That warning is increasingly relevant. In recent years, governments and institutions have embraced what's been called safetyism: the belief that safety, especially from physical or emotional harm, should override all other values, including freedom, autonomy and open debate. When safety becomes the highest good, risk becomes intolerable, state control is normalized 'for your own good,' and dissent is cast as dangerous. Article content Article content Consider the uproar over American Christian worship singer Sean Feucht's performances in Canada. Several cities cancelled or denied his permits under the guise of ' health and safety,' not just physical safety, but protecting people from ideas or language they might find upsetting. Article content Or take Nova Scotia's sweeping ban on all forest activity this summer without a permit, accompanied by $25,000 fines (plus tax and a victim's surcharge). Concerned about fire risk, the provincial government issued a proclamation under the Forests Act to prohibit far more than what is needed to prevent fires, including fishing from barren rock, walking a dog on a trail, or having a picnic. Its reasoning: anyone in the woods might do something dangerous, like lighting a campfire or committing arson. Article content Punishing people who violate burn bans is reasonable. Treating every nature lover as a potential criminal is Minority Report logic, incompatible with a free society. Some defenders of the forest lockdown have even argued that hikers could cause fires by dropping water bottles that might, in a remote theoretical scenario, focus sunlight like a magnifying glass. By that standard, we could justify banning almost anything: driving, swimming, or stepping outside. Such fears say more about an individual's risk tolerance than actual danger. Article content Article content This 'safety above all else' mindset has been used repeatedly to justify government overreach. It was cited in 2022 to invoke the Emergencies Act against the non-violent Freedom Convoy protests. It underpinned the Trudeau government's decision to list all plastic manufactured items, from straws and bags to hard hats and medical equipment, as 'toxic' under federal environmental law. It drives 'bubble zone' laws that prioritize emotional comfort for some while stripping others of constitutionally protected free speech and assembly rights.
Associated Press
4 days ago
- Politics
- Associated Press
Spiked on why the crackdown on wolf-whistling is ‘precrime' in action
LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM, August 15, 2025 / / -- Spiked has published a powerful new article titled 'The Crackdown on Wolf-Whistling Is Precrime in Action', challenging the UK government's proposed legislation to criminalize wolf-whistling and similar public behaviour. The article argues that the law, which targets actions causing 'intentional harassment, alarm or distress,' risks punishing people based on assumed intent rather than actual harm. Spiked warns this marks a dangerous shift toward preemptive policing and undermines the principle of personal liberty. With sharp analysis and a firm defence of free expression, the piece calls into question the broader cultural and legal consequences of criminalizing ambiguous social interactions. Read the full article here: -precrime-in-action/ Website: Email: [email protected] CP Media Global Limited email us here Jonathan Edwards Visit us on social media: YouTube X Other Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
Times
02-08-2025
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
