Wiktionary
a. Before a crime.
Wikipedia
Precrime (today usually spelled "pre-crime") is a term coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed. Pre-crime has been defined as 'substantive coercive state interventions targeted at non-imminent crimes'. Pre-crime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats. The term pre-crime embodies a temporal paradox, suggesting both that a crime has not occurred and that the crime that has not occurred is a foregone conclusion (McCulloch and Wilson 2016).
Usage examples of "precrime".
To repeat: The Precrime Agency of the Federal Westbloc Government is in the process of locating and neutralizing its former Commissioner, John Allison Anderton, who, through the methodology of the Precrime-system, is hereby declared a potential murderer and as such forfeits his rights to freedom and all its privileges.
This man, John Allison Anderton, was instrumental in the original creation of the Precrime system, the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals through the ingenious use of mutant precogs, capable of previewing future events and transferring orally that data to analytical machinery.