Predictive Policing

As humankind progressed at an incredibly fast pace, technology has advanced the same pace as well. In today’s modern world, technology brings a handful of benefits into our lives. But at the same time, it makes actions like monitoring what people are saying and doing, checking their personal information become much easier. The evolvement in technology contributed a lot to the government, to the point that they could be able to predict crime in advance and prevent it from happening. This comes from the concept of pre-crime from the movie Minority Report. And believe it or not, the government is pushing forward pre-crime technologies, and some even have already deployed, not being a theory in the movie anymore.
Thanks to new technologies, law enforcement officers now can do their job more efficiently and more efficient. For example, “Beware” is application created by Intrado, a U.S. based
Law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson notes in his article “Predictive Policing And Reasonable Suspicion,” that law enforcement must acquire either “probable cause” to search or “reasonable suspicion” to seize an individual. He argues, “Because predictive policing does not provide personal knowledge about an ongoing crime, or particularized identification of the suspect involved, it cannot support the weight of reasonable suspicion” (Ferguson 305). He also asserts that most police investigation focuses on individual suspects. “Perhaps police observation reveals criminal activity, perhaps police receive an informant tip, or perhaps circumstantial evidence suggests police focus on a particular individual. No matter the method of investigation, at some point police will need to interfere with the liberty interests of the individual and, thus, create a tension with Fourth Amendment protections” (Ferguson