The term was coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed.
[1][page needed] George Orwell introduced a similar concept in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four using the term thoughtcrime to describe illegal thoughts which held banned opinions about the ruling government or intentions to act against it.
In Philip K. Dick's 1956 science fiction short story "The Minority Report", Precrime is the name of a criminal justice agency, the task of which is to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future.
[3] Precrime in criminology dates back to the positivist school in the late 19th century, especially to Cesare Lombroso's idea that there are "born criminals", who can be recognized, even before they have committed any crime, on the basis of certain physical characteristics.
[17] In 2020, the Tampa Bay Times compared the Pasco County Sheriff's Office precrime detection program to the film Minority Report, citing pervasive monitoring of suspects and repeated visits to their homes, schools, and places of employment.
Crime prediction software is criticised by academics and by privacy and civil liberties groups due to concerns about the lack of evidence for the technology's reliability and accuracy.
This statistically leads law enforcement agencies to make decisions and predictions that unfairly target and label minority communities as at risk for criminal activity.
[22] A study published in Science Advances by two researchers found that groups of randomly chosen people could predict whether a past criminal would be convicted of a future crime with about 67 percent accuracy, a rate that was extremely similar to COMPAS.
[23] Although COMPAS does not explicitly collect data regarding race, a study testing its accuracy on more than 7,000 individuals arrested in Broward County, Florida showed substantial racial disparities in the software's predictions.