An Episode in the History of PreCrime

This article traces the rise of "predictive" attitudes to crime prevention. After a brief summary of the current spread of predictive policing based on person-centered and place-centered mathematical models, an episode in the scientific study of future crime is examined. At UCLA between 1969 and 1973, a well-funded "violence center" occasioned great hopes that the quotient of human "dangerousness"-potential violence against other humans-could be quantified and thereby controlled. At the core of the center, under the direction of interrogation expert and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, was a project to gather unprecedented amounts of behavioral data and centrally store it to identify emergent crime. Protesters correctly seized on the violence center as a potential site of racially targeted experimentation in psychosurgery and an example of iatrogenic science. Yet the eventual spectacular failure of the center belies an ultimate success: its data-driven vision itself predicted the Philip K. Dick-style PreCrime policing now emerging. The UCLA violence center thus offers an alternative genealogy to predictive policing. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.