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Old 2012-11-09, 12:17   Link #34
Triple_R
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Age: 42
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I think the thing is that Ginoza, Akane, and their team aren't exactly like police officers as we think of them. Yes, there's a lot of overlap there (especially in style and aesthetics), but I think that the role that Ginoza et al fulfill is fundamentally different than that of a city police force.

On another thread, TinyRedLeaf noted how the Criminal Investigation Department's logo is adapted from the North American symbol for the medical profession. Like TRL, I don't think that's a coincidence.

With that in mind, I'll tell you what I think "the police" of Psycho-Pass actually are. To get to that, though, I'll need to go top-down.


Let's suppose that we think of human society as a single organism; that the totality of human society is like one human organism, and each individual person is like merely one cell in the human society's "body".

The Sibyl System is the brain of this Human Society organism. It's goal is to keep the organism as healthy and productive as possible.

People with high crime coefficients are like parts of the body that have become infected with a disease, and the disease threatens to spread to other parts of the body. You could think of it as cancer, perhaps.

"The police" are like white blood cells that are there to defend "the Human Society body" against diseases. And that's how Ginoza et al function. They look for abnormalities in "the body", and/or they're alerted to them, and then they head out to neutralize these abnormalities. If the "diseased cell" (i.e. the human being with a high crime coefficient) can be brought back by therapy, then great, we "freeze and heal" the "diseased cell" (i.e. use Paralyzing shot and take into custody). If the "diseased cell" is deemed to be beyond healing, then we amputate it, cut it out, eliminate it entirely. This is done with a certain cool precision - Note how nobody (not even Akane) showed much discomfort over the thought of killing a man with the Dominator. To be fair, this episode's perp arguably did deserve to die - If convicted of his crimes in many modern US states, he'd almost certainly get the death penalty. Nonetheless, the fact that nobody really questions (even from a purely pragmatic perspective) the Dominator setting itself to kill this episode's perp is pretty telling, imo.

And I think the reason is how the Sibyl system is set-up, which ironically creates a bit of a blind spot in it, which our likely main antagonist is using very effectively (by essentially sacrificing pawns to the Sibyl system to ensure his own continued evasion).


In the real world, the police are (or at least are supposed to be) concerned with things like "deterrence", "rehabilitation", and "human/legal rights". But maybe that's not how the Sibyl System works. It takes the notion of Collectivism to a certain extreme, where human society itself is viewed as an organism. And criminals are simply deceased parts of "the body" that need to be neutralized. Deterring other "cells" from becoming criminals isn't even a consideration; rehabilitation is only a consideration insofar as "therapy" is considered likely to work. And human/legal rights seem to go out the door once you hit a certain Crime Coefficient.
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