ABSTRACT

The 2002 movie Minority Report imagined a future, only 50 years hence, in which ‘pre-crime’ police arrest people for the crime they are about to commit. It is a world where all individuals – criminals and law-abiding citizens alike – can be identified by iris scans. A voice calls out to shoppers as they pass each storefront, calling them by name, reminding them of past purchases. Those who have shopped on the web know that already merchants are able to remind customers of past purchases, and try to suggest other items that are consistent with their tastes. But the movie goes much further. The pre-crime police send little iris-scanning robots into apartment buildings to identify marked pre-criminals. Of course, Hollywood could not make a policing movie without violence and chase scenes, so it retained the idea of pursuit and arrest as the central element of its precrime policing model. However, the underlying concept of late modern society painted by this movie – and by critics of situational crime prevention – is to intervene at any cost in the course of events so that the crime is stopped before it can be committed. The movie adopts a ‘big brother’ model, portraying surveillance as visible and openly intrusive, whereas critics of the ‘culture of control’ that encompasses situational crime prevention claim that surveillance occurs ‘behind the scenes’, hidden and obligingly submitted to by unthinking, unknowing citizens.