History Main / PrecrimeArrest

* The 1996 BMovie ''Past Perfect'' involved a justice program from TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture that sentenced criminals and then sent hunter teams back in time to kill them just when they were starting their careers. While most of them are irredeemable jackasses, one of them (who was the gang's rookie and had not yet crossed the MoralEventHorizon) ends up declaring that he wishes to repent and his criminal record changes because of the ButterflyOfDoom--still, this is not enough for the team's psychotic leader and he continues trying to kill the kid. [[spoiler:The film's epilogue shows that the cop that was the protagonist, now a judge, started the program in the future... but the events of the film had him change it to send people back who could teach criminals how to take a better path before they became irredeemable.]]

* On a more mundane level, nearly every country has laws against [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal) conspiracy to commit a crime]] and in many jurisdictions you can be arrested for possessing "burglary tools" such as lockpicks unless you can prove you had them for a lawful purpose. To be charged with a conspiracy, the participants must have committed at least one "overt act" in furtherance of it however (such as obtaining guns to commit a bank robbery before it takes place).

* In ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheWinterSoldier'', SHIELD's Project: Insight is based around having three all-new Helicarriers designed to police the world, taking out potential threats before they do any actual threatening. [[spoiler:In truth, the project is under the control of HYDRA, and the Insight Helicarriers are driven by an algorithm designed by Arnim Zola to calculate any and all potential threats to HYDRA's World Domination, and ''terminate them all''.]]

* The final season of ''Series/{{Elementary}}'' features a similar example to the Machine in ''Person of Interest'', but presented in a more negative manner; [[spoiler:Odin Reichenbach is a tech mogul whose public media platforms have given him access to a range of online material that he believes can be used to anticipate future crimes. However, he is soon shown to be far too willing to take action based on that evidence while ignoring such variables as the human need to vent; as an example, Sherlock notes that he killed a school bus driver who was discussing her thoughts of killing her passengers, but a look at this woman’s past online history showed that she made similar rants in the past and never followed through with her ‘threats’]].

* ''ComicBook/CivilWarII'': Captain Marvel wants to use a new character's powers to stop crimes and attacks from happening. She faces opposition in the form of Iron Man and his allies who refuse to punish people before the crime. Things become a whole lot more muddied when Tony Stark presents evidence that the visions are not one hundred percent accurate to begin with and facts like Ulysses (the seer) having some kind of prejudice can make them even more inaccurate but Carol Danvers absolutely refuses to hear it. [[spoiler:And then it turns out that one of the people Carol arrested because the visions saw her commit a terrorist act decides to become one when Carol lets her go in the arc's epilogue out of sheer hatred for Captain Marvel -- although so far [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse nothing has come from it]].]]

* ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay''. Sarah Connor learns from the Terminator (who {{time travel}}ed back in time to her present day) that the person most directly responsible for the creation of Skynet is a Cyberdyne Systems engineer named Miles Dyson. She tries to assassinate Dyson to prevent Skynet from ever existing.

* One episode of ''Series/HerculesTheLegendaryJourneys'' had Iolaus given a chance by [[TheDevil Dahak]] to save the life of a man who was hanging precariously from a rope bridge. However, Dahak also showed Iolaus that if the man survived, he would soon go on to rob and kill an innocent family. Iolaus chose not to save him and let the guy fall to his death. Dahak then gleefully pointed out that since the guy had not actually committed a crime ''yet'', Iolaus technically murdered an innocent man.

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]

* While in the West outright arrest is not allowed, there had been examples, such as Chicago, [[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/precrime-film-documentary-minority-report-police-a8289576.html of the use of an algorithm to predict its inhabitants’ potential involvement with violent crime, which creates a Strategic Subject List - known colloquially as the “heat list” - a comprehensive list of who it considers to be the most dangerous people in the city]], and people are commonly warned due to this list. The reason why outright arrest is not allow is that modern Western legal systems have a heavy emphasis on "innocent until proven guilty" and "punishment after the crime". If the possibility--even if ''incredibly'' small--exists to ScrewDestiny, then the usage of this Trope in real life would probably be seen as unfair arrest or (in the most extreme examples when people do nothing but wait until the event happens and taking action JustInTime) entrapment.

* ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' plays with this. Beerus executes Zamasu partly for his various crimes, the bulk of which he has yet to commit, while avoiding the legal problems outlined above due to knowing with certainty that he is going to do it.

* In ''Film/MinorityReport'', the TropeNamer, three psychics are used by the state in order to apprehend and subdue people before they commit murder, keeping said latent criminals into a vegetative state. There is talk of expanding it into lesser crimes, as well, although the AsYouKnow conversation at the beginning explains that only murder is strong enough to trigger a psychic vision. During the "Precrime experiment", the captured criminals are detained in a comatose state with electronic files on their future crime. [[spoiler:When the movie ends with the protagonist proving that people don't have to commit the crime they are predicted to commit, the criminals are released because he proved their innocence (or, rather, introduced reasonable doubt).]]

* ''WesternAnimation/CodenameKidsNextDoor'': One episode features a pre-delinquency unit that gives Gallagher Elementary School students detentions for future rule-breaking. [[spoiler:Their seer turns out to be a hoax who just wants to be sure the school cafeteria won't run out of pizza before his turn to be served. His plan failed because he executed it during]] ''[[spoiler:lima bean day]]''.

* The plot of ''VideoGame/WatchDogs2'' is kicked off by Marcus Holloway, who breaks into a [=CTOS=] server farm to erase the digital files [[MegaCorp Blume]] has on him. His digital file contains his legal record, which stated that he was the prime suspect in the burglary of a robbery, that he's a skilled programmer, and has a license to own a gun. Although there was no concrete evidence that he was responsible for the robbery, he was convicted only because [=CTOS=] calculated that he was threat because of the afromentioned variables.

* ''ComicBook/CivilWarII'': Captain Marvel wants to use a new character's powers to stop crimes and attacks from happening. She faces opposition in the form of Iron Man and his allies who refuse to punish people before the crime.

* An issue of ''ComicBook/SavageDragon'' deconstructs this when an alien (that had landed on Earth some years before and was raised by some kind farmers) starts attacking people seemingly at random and kill them. The characters theorize that the alien has a capacity to see the future and the alien's "father" believes that the people who were killed would have become violent criminals in the time to come, and thus the alien was taking them out pre-emptively to avoid mass murders. The deconstruction is that, as Dragon points out, there is no real evidence of this being true (the alien is pretty inscrutable, for one)... and the fact that people have died before they would ever commit any kind of crime means that there never will be. Which means that the alien is (in the eyes of the law that Dragon has swore to enforce) nothing more than a homicidal maniac that needs be stopped ''now''.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/AllTheTroublesOfTheWorld'': Multivac's precrime functions alert the police to crimes before they happen. They then intervene by warning and detain only in rare circumstances. The ability has been expanded several times over, and the next stage is anticipating outbreaks of illness. But the plot kicks off when the arrest of an accused criminal increases the crime's probability of execution. The police are scrambling to figure out how to stop a crime worse than murder.

* While in the west outright arrest is not allowed, there had been examples, such as Chicago, [[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/precrime-film-documentary-minority-report-police-a8289576.html of the use of algorithm to predict its inhabitants’ potential involvement with violent crime, which creates a Strategic Subject List - known colloquially as the “heat list” - a comprehensive list of who it considers to be the most dangerous people in the city]], and people are commonly warned due to this list. The reason why outright arrest is not allow is that modern western legal systems have a heavy emphasis on "innocent until proven guilty" and "punishment after the crime". If the possibility--even if ''incredibly'' small--exists to ScrewDestiny, then the usage of this Trope in real life would probably be seen as unfair arrest or (in the most extreme examples when people do nothing but wait until the event happens and taking action JustInTime) entrapment.
* While in the west it is seen as a pretty heavy example of HollywoodLaw and ArtisticLicenseLaw, this is already implemented by [[https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-said-to-deploy-big-data-for-predictive-policing-in-xinjiang-1519719096 China as "Integrated Joint Operations Platform"]], using Big Data to identify and pre-emptively detain potential troublemakers in Xinjian.

* On a more mundane level, nearly every country has laws against [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal) conspiracy to commit a crime]] and in many jurisdictions you can be arrested for possessing "burglary tools" such as lockpicks unless you can prove you had them for a lawful purpose.

* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' had an episode named "Relativity", where the 29th century timeship ''Relativity'' is attempting to stop a time-paradox sabotage attempt on the 24th century spaceship ''Voyager''. After the culprit responsible for the mess is found, ''two'' earlier versions of the culprit are arrested. The Captain assures Captain Janeway that the three would be "integrated" into one person before his trial.
* Discussed but eventually averted on ''Series/CrimeTraveller'': because of the way the rules of time travel work on the series, it is impossible to stop a crime before it happens (when it's tried, "YouAlreadyChangedThePast" instead ensues), so all that can be done is witness the event and circumstances before and immediately after and obtain clues that were not immediately apparent on the "present".

* ''Series/PersonOfInterest'' centers around preventing premeditated violent crimes before they happen through the predictions of a sentient supercomputer. Since the predictions are generally made some time between the end of the planning phase and the beginning of the execution phase of the future crime, there's generally enough evidence to turn them over to the police for attempted murder.

* In the Silver Age, the ComicBook/LegionOfSuper-Heroes once incarcerated Superboy in a kryptonite prison, after they had witnessed him committing several acts of wanton destruction through a "futurescope" and concluded that he would become a supervillain in the future. [[spoiler:In the end, it turned out that SuperDickery was in full effect as he was actually destroying an extremely dangerous weapon and things connected to it (which the Legion didn't know about, because everything had been covered up by the government).]]

-->-- '''Department of [=PreCrime=] Chief John Anderton''', UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, [[UsefulNotes/TheUnitedStates U.S.A.]], [[JustInTime Tuesday, April 22, 2054, 8:04 AM EST]] (''Film/MinorityReport'').

* The 1996 BMovie ''"Past Perfect"'' involved a justice program from TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture that sentenced criminals and then sent hunter teams back in time to kill them just when they were starting their careers. While most of them are irredeemable jackasses, one of them (who was the gang's rookie and had not yet crossed the MoralEventHorizon) ends up declaring that he wishes to repent and his criminal record changes because of the ButterflyOfDoom--still, this is not enough for the team's psychotic leader and he continues trying to kill the kid. [[spoiler:The film's epilogue shows that the cop that was the protagonist, now a judge, started the program in the future... but the events of the film had him change it to send people back who could teach criminals how to take a better path before they became irredeemable.]]

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'': In "A Stitch in Time", a professor invented a time travel machine after previously having been raped when she was younger. She tried to correct the past by going back in time and [[SerialKillerKiller killing convicted serial killers]] before they could claim any victims - but since all her victims hadn't killed anyone ''yet'', they are seen as completely innocent victims of ''another'' serial killer with a career spanning ''decades''. [[spoiler:She eventually undoes her own motivation to do this by saving her younger self, but one of her victims went on to kill the partner of an FBI agent - a murder reversed by time travel, then re-done by the penultimate timeline change - so the agent goes back to save her partner by killing the killer. It's implied that the agent will go on a similar time-travelling killing spree to the one she began the episode investigating]].

* In the short story "All the Troubles of the World" by Creator/IsaacAsimov, the [[MasterComputer Multivac supercomputer]] is used to churn through data about the population and predict crimes before they occur, allowing authorities to stop them. A variant, because people aren't punished for uncommitted crimes, the police merely warn, intervene and temporarily detain only in rare circumstances. The plot kicks off when the subject of one such prediction has no idea what he's being detained for, and Multivac subsequently reports that the predicted crime has ''increased'' in probability since the police intervened.

-->-- '''Department of PreCrime Chief John Anderton''', UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, [[UsefulNotes/TheUnitedStates U.S.A.]], [[JustInTime Tuesday, April 22, 2054, 8:04 AM EST]] (''Film/MinorityReport'').

-->-- '''Department of Precrime Chief John Anderton''', UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, [[UsefulNotes/TheUnitedStates U.S.A.]], [[JustInTime Wednesday, April 22, 2054, 8:04 AM EST]] (''Film/MinorityReport'').

-->-- '''Precrime Department Chief John Anderton''', UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, [[JustInTime April 22, 2054, 8:04 AM EST]] (''Film/MinorityReport'').

-->-- '''John Anderton''', ''Film/MinorityReport'', UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, [[JustInTime April 22, 2054, 8:04 AM EST]].

-->-- '''John Anderton''', ''Film/MinorityReport'', [[JustInTime 8:04 AM, April 22, 2054]].