LONDON, England - July 25, 2010 - Software that can predict when and where future violent crimes will be committed is being used in Britain for the first time.

Two police forces have begun trialing the sophisticated program, which has echoes of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, where psychics are used to stop criminals before they commit crimes.

The system, known as Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates crime records, intelligence briefings, offender profiles and even weather reports, in order to identify potential flashpoints where a crime is most likely to occur.

The “predictive analytics” technology has been credited as a key factor behind a 31% fall in crime and 15% drop in violent crime in Memphis, Tennessee, according to The Observer.

John Williams, of the Memphis Crime Analysis Unit, said, “This is more of a proactive tool than reacting after crimes have occurred. This pretty much puts officers in the area at the time that the crimes are being committed.”

The software has been developed by IBM, which has invested $11 billion in analytics over the past four years.

Mark Cleverley, the company’s head of government strategy, said, “What the technology does is what police officers have always done, sometimes purely on instinct - looking for patterns to work out what is likely to happen next. What is different is the scale on which the system operates and the speed at which the analysis takes place.”

Ed. Note: Until someone commits a crime he is an innocent person. Therefore, in order to prevent crime it is necessary to restrict the liberty of someone who has not committed a crime, in other words, an innocent person. That is the cost of this technology. To a freedom lover it is far too high a price to pay for crime prevention.