ABSTRACT
In his popular treatment of predictive policing, The Minority Report, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick imagines a fantastic world in which felonies have been reduced by 99.8 per cent. Intelligence for crime prevention is provided to the State’s ‘Precrime’ department by three mutant ‘precogs’ who possess the talent of foreseeing the future. As with much of Dick’s work, the book reflects on the existence of multiple realities and the free will of humans in bringing them about. In this instance, the Head of Precrime, Police Commissioner Anderton, is identified by two of the three precogs as the prospective murderer of one Leopold Kaplan. Anderton suspects Ed Witwer, his ambitious junior colleague, of corrupting the system in order to oust him. To clear his name, he searches for the suppressed minority report of the third precog which provides an alternative vision of Kaplan’s murder. Subsequently, Anderton discovers the precog reports are visions of alternative realities, all of which could come about, but such is his commitment to the concept of Precrime that he deliberately chooses to kill Kaplan to corroborate the majority report and maintain the legitimacy of the Precrime department.
