Minority Report

The fiction defines the nightmare. The table scores what reality has already built — each symptom checkable, each status sourced, the absences counted as honestly as the arrivals.

The symptoms

	symptom	the evidence	as of
◐	The state scores named individuals for crimes they have not yet committedpartial	The UK Ministry of Justice built a 'homicide prediction project' (Jan 2023–Dec 2024) using police data on 100,000–500,000 people, revealed by Statewatch in April 2025; the MoJ insists it is research-only and not operationally deployed, while a related risk tool (ARNS) has been piloted since Dec 2024 with national roll-out planned for 2026. The systems exist and are fed with real records; no state yet acts on the scores directly. [source]	2025-04
◐	Algorithms direct police patrols to predicted crime locationspartial	Market leader Geolitica (formerly PredPol) shut down on 31 Dec 2023 after The Markup found under 1% of its predictions in Plainfield, NJ matched a later-reported crime; in Jan 2024 US senators asked the DOJ to halt funding for such programs. SoundThinking absorbed Geolitica's patents and customers and sells patrol-forecasting into 250+ jurisdictions. Deployed at scale, retreating on evidence. [source]	2024-01
✅	Risk scores decide who stays in a cell and for how longpresent	COMPAS recidivism scores have informed US sentencing and pretrial decisions since 1998; Wisconsin's Supreme Court upheld sentencing use of the trade-secret algorithm in Loomis (2016), meaning defendants cannot fully inspect the score that helps jail them. The Arnold Public Safety Assessment, built from ~750,000 cases, informs pretrial detention in roughly 300 jurisdictions; HRDAG documented ongoing racial-disparity harms in May 2023. [source]	2023-05
✅	Machines identify passers-by on the public street in real timepresent	The Met's fixed live-facial-recognition cameras in Croydon scanned 470,000+ people between Oct 2025 and Mar 2026 and produced 173 arrests — one every 35 minutes of operation — with permanent cameras announced for the West End and Soho by end of 2026 (Computer Weekly, May 2026). In New Orleans, police quietly received real-time face-match alerts from a private 200-camera network from 2023 to April 2025, outside any formal authorization. [source]	2026-05
✅	Advertising identifies and follows the individual through daily lifepresent	The film's iris-scanning mall ads exist today via the phone rather than the eye: real-time bidding broadcasts Americans' locations and behavior roughly 107 trillion times a year (ICCL figures via EFF, Jan 2025), and FTC actions against Mobilewalla and Gravy Analytics (Dec 2024) documented brokers tagging people at clinics, protests, and churches. In March 2026 EFF reported CBP obtaining ad-derived location data on demand. [source]	2026-03
✅	Pre-emptive watchlists impose consequences without charge or trialpresent	The US Terrorist Screening Dataset held roughly 2 million people at the end of 2023 (CBS News, Dec 2023); a March 2025 GAO report issued 24 recommendations to seven agencies over misidentification and broken redress. Pasco County, FL ran an 'Intelligence Led Policing' program that pre-emptively targeted residents; in Dec 2024 the Sheriff's Office settled, acknowledged First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations, and is barred from rebuilding it. [source]	2025-03
—	A person is arrested and punished for a specific crime that never occurredabsent	This does not exist. No surveyed jurisdiction authorizes arrest or conviction on a forecast alone; criminal liability still requires an act, and even inchoate offenses (attempt, conspiracy) require conduct. The closest US mechanism — civil commitment upheld in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) — is civil, not criminal, and requires proof of past conduct plus a diagnosed condition. Law is currently moving the other way: the EU banned profiling-only crime prediction outright on 2 Feb 2025, with fines to €35M or 7% of turnover. [source]	2026-07

The honest read

The score measures infrastructure, not intent: the scores, the lists, the street-level face-matching, and the tracking mesh are all built and running, but the film's defining act — punishment for an uncommitted crime — exists nowhere, and law on two continents moved against it in 2024–2025 (the EU ban, the Pasco settlement, the UK's research-only line). The real barrier is doctrinal and old: criminal liability requires an act, and that requirement is holding. Base rate honesty cuts both ways — the oracle is not real (Geolitica's measured hit rate was under 1%), yet being scored already carries consequences: a watchlist entry, a denied release, a knock at the door. The danger today is not the accurate prophecy; it is the inaccurate one treated as evidence.