NEW YORK: In a sinister, authoritarian American city of the future, cutting-edge surveillance technology and over-zealous policing combine to create the ultimate weapon in the war on crime: the ability to track down individuals who will go on to become criminals — before they have even done anything wrong.

This may be the premise of Minority Report, the sci-fi thriller starring Tom Cruise, set in Washington D.C in 2054 — but it also appears to be par for the course today, barely 160 kilometres away in Wilmington, the largest city in the otherwise unremarkable US state of Delaware.

Civil liberties campaigners have responded with anger to the news that, for the last three months, Wilmington police have been compiling a database of people whom they believe are likely to break the law in the future.

At least 200 people have had their photographs taken and stored, along with personal information, to aid police in finding potential suspects when crimes are subsequently committed, according to the Wilmington police department.

The individuals, mostly black men, were photographed by “jump-out squads” of police officers, who cruise high-crime neighbourhoods in the city, often in unmarked cars, then jump out at street corners to round up and search people gathering there.

“So if they’ve stopped you three times on Eighth and Washington, and a crime occurs on Eighth and Washington, they’ve got your name and they know you were stopped three times,” said Drewry Fennell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Delaware, who called the scheme a “terrible idea”.

In Minority Report, based on a novel by Philip K Dick, Cruise plays John Anderton, a police chief who pursues future criminals using information provided by three semi-conscious psychics, called “pre-cogs” — until the pre-cogs visualize the murder that he himself is about to commit. Wilmington police, not known for their psychic powers, rely instead on targeting areas where drug-dealing is believed to be rife.

Opponents argue that the policy is unconstitutional, not least because the first amendment permits free assembly. “This is an intimidating practice that causes people to be unwilling to assemble,” Ms Ferrell said.

“People are not there because there is drug use. There is drug use because there’s people there,” she observed.

But city authorities are giving the objectors short shrift, pointing to the so-called Terry laws, which allow police to stop and frisk people they think are acting suspiciously. Calling critics “asinine,” Wilmington mayor James Baker ruled out suspending the policy.

“I don’t care what anyone but a court of law thinks,” he said. “Until a court of law says otherwise, if I say it’s constitutional, it’s constitutional ... These are targeted, directed sweeps in high-crime areas where police have been turned loose to attack bad people.”

Invoking a principle frequently condemned by civil liberties advocates — that the practice need not worry those who had done nothing wrong — Mayor Baker added: “Good little kiddies in the wrong place at the wrong time are not getting their picture taken.”

Chief of police Michael Szczerba, Wilmington’s nearest equivalent to Tom Cruise, was even more succinct in an interview with the Wilmington Journal, encapsulating his attitude with the words: “Say cheese and tell the judge how you plead.”

Any legal challenge to the database is likely to rest on whether police had reasonable suspicion to believe that each person photographed had already committed, or was committing, a criminal offence — a standard that would be hard to meet if, as critics allege, whole crowds are being frisked, sometimes including people who gather to witness proceedings after the squad has arrived.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.