Introduction

Following World War II, modern national security intelligence agencies in English-speaking countries had a simple mandate: to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Implementation was not so simple during the height of the Cold War. National security agencies partnered with federal/national law enforcement and started looking inward for potential threats. The problem was that state actors could not legally peer into the lives of ordinary citizens, absent probable cause as determined by the judiciary. Senator Frank Church rightfully recommended a targeted approach to minimize further violations of the freedoms and rights of the American population (see United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities 1976 a.k.a. Church Committee). ‘Targeted’ national security surveillance proceeded in the next two decades. Nevertheless, following 9/11 widespread mass security surveillance of global populations became entrenched under the auspices of the global war on terror (GWT). Terrorism discursively and globally juxtaposed violent crime and the spectacle of mass kinetic attack guided by ideology, politics or religion. This helped create the conditions for our present-day pre-crime mentality.

Pre-crime stems from futuristic dystopian fiction, specifically Steven Spielberg's 2002 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1957 (see Dick 1987/1991) short story, The Minority Report, wherein specialized pre-crime police are tasked with arresting and charging those who have been determined by ‘Precogs’ to be murderers, though the murder suspects who are charged have yet to commit (nor have attempted to commit) murder (Dick, 1987/1991). This said, the idea of preventing and/or pre-empting crime prior to its materialization is per se a modern governmental preoccupation. Loosely speaking, classical thinkers such as Colquhoun, Beccaria and Bentham problematized crime within the broader mindscape of creating the conditions for a well-regulated and selfdisciplined population. The state would ideally enable self-governance through the formation (or reformation) of apparatuses of utilitarian discipline and deterrence (such as the modern police, rationalized law, and the prison). Classical reformers were proponents of preventing crime rather than pre-empting it. From the mid-nineteenth century (and until perhaps the interwar period), crime became increasingly viewed as a biopolitical problem of controlling dangerous and/or habitually criminal individuals (Foucault, 1978; Garland, 1985). While not representative of the majority of police practice, nevertheless identifying and preempting the most dangerous and/or habitual offender increasingly became a cornerstone of detective work.