On “Pre-Crime”

It’s been a while since I posted something here.  But, I’ve been distracted.  What can I say?

(WARNING:  The following article is not authoritative in any sense.  This is entirely armchair philosophizing and borderline navel-gazing that may in fact make no sense whatsoever to someone actually educated in the given fields.  There are minimal citations and only a shallow depth of research into the theories and science involved.  This is less a blueprint for actually creating a system as described, and more of a bare surface-scratching way of looking at a single way we could end up with a kind of “Pre-Crime” system based on technology that is somewhat plausible.  I was also somewhat sleep-deprived when I started.)

Let’s get down to business.  The idea of Predictive Criminology, Predictive Policing, or in pop-culture terms, “Pre-Crime” is the topic.  As it stands today, Predictive Policing is confined to sending police to patrol areas where crime is considered likely to happen in a nebulous sense based on aggregate criminal patterns.  A more specific application is most well-described in the film “Minority Report”, in which a section of the District of Columbia’s Police Department implements a system with predicts crime before it happens.  In the movie, the Pre-Crime unit draws on the abilities of three ‘pre-cogs’, who have the ability to see the future.  Specifically, they have the ability to forsee murders before they happen.  Using images from these visions, the Pre-Crime unit determines the time and location of a predicted murder and arrive on the scene before it takes place, arresting the pre-criminal before he/she can kill.

On Death

(Parts of this post are modified from a recent post on my new blog, Casa de Cass, which can be read here)

Yes, “On Death”.  That simple, that plain.  Though, I’m not going to necessarily tackle to topic of Death itself (something for a later post, I think).  This post is kind of how I dealt with Death recently.  Because it’s been coming at me from every direction, and as a result, plans to blitz through tons of writing these past few weeks stalled out and my initiative and motivation were squashed.

On Guns

Recently, a friend of mine seemed to think that I’m some kind of flowery peacenik hippie liberal who hates guns and seemed surprised that I wanted to buy one.  This seems to be a common mistake, I think; there’s a strong correlation between people who favor policies like a robust social safety net, Universal Health Care, rehabilitative corrections and those who favor gun control.  Problem is, it’s not a direct causal link.  My anarchist attitude towards life requires individual self-defense to be a high priority, and as a result, I must say that I’m a hardcore gun nut.

On “Crime Time”

I’ve gotten the nickname in the offices of The West Georgian of “Crime Time”, because of my work writing crime-related articles, particularly the police blotter articles.  In the past, on my facebook, I produced a short and sweet guide to writing crime stories for The West Georgian.  I summed up the steps and laid out a few guidelines for anyone who wished to follow in my footsteps at the paper.  This next year I will likely continue at my post, but I do hope that when I do move on, that the person who follows me does a good job and finds my guidance to be useful in carrying out the job.  I don’t mean to say that I’m the definitive word on writing crime stories, but I take great pride in my work, as I think I do a rather thorough job of it.

On Graffiti

Graffiti is as old as 30,000 B.C.E.; it can be found in the earliest attempts of cave drawing, when humans first started deciding to write on things to express ideas before language existed.  The only surviving examples of Safaitic (an ancient pre-arabic language) are in the form of approximately 6,000 year old graffiti on rocks in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  The earliest examples of what is referred to as “modern” graffiti date back to Ancient Greece.  Ancient Romans left numerous examples of graffiti all over their empire, and to this day are useful in studying Roman culture.  Graffiti is a human tradition, as old as our need to communicate, and of great importance and relevance.