柏林警方考虑采用软件预测犯罪行为
When police officers in Minority Report predicted who would commit crimes, and stopped them before they happened, it was considered so futuristic the film was set in 2054.
电影《少数派报告》中的警察能预测谁会犯罪，并在他们实施犯罪之前阻止他们。这样的场景因太过虚幻，所以被设置在2054年。
But, police in Berlin are considering adopting a similar software that predicts crimes and is named 'Precobs' -- in a nod to the sci-fi film.
Other forces, including police officers in two American states and London's Metropolitan Police are also trialling predictive systems to catch would-be criminals.
Developed by a German firm, the software program predicts when and where a crime is most likely to occur, based on different sets of data.
It is being tested by police in the southern state of Bavaria.
'The Berlin police is first waiting for the results of the trial run in Bavaria' before deciding on on whether to acquire Precobs, a spokesman said.
The name is a contraction of 'Pre-Crime Observation System'.
The 'Precobs' title borrows deliberately from the 'precog' term used in Minority Report referring to three psychics who predict crimes before they happen.
The 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg was based on a story by Philip K Dick.
The German Precobs system relies on data of the location, time and other details of past crimes, such as home break-ins.
When a new incident is reported, the software analyses the data to look for a pattern that will point to a future target.
It was developed by the Institute for pattern-based Prediction Technique in Oberhausen.
The initial results from tests on burglaries in the Bavarian cities of Munich and Nuremberg are 'promising', the state's interior minister Joachim Herrmann said in a progress report last month.