Can crime still exist if mages can see the past?

Question

In my world one of the branches of magic is Sight; foresight, farsight and hindsight.

Foresight is basically the gift of prophecy. It's limited in that the world doesn't exist in a fixed timeline, so you can only see possible or probable futures. A very powerful Seer is dangerous and can see well enough to guide events, but someone of that power is rare.

Farsight does what it says on the tin; it lets you see things happening far away (technically anything happening at the present). It's useful only if you know where to look to see something important or relevant.

But Hindsight is where I'm having trouble. It's the ability to see visions of the past; true visions of events that actually happened. My issue is finding a way to limit this power. Unlimited it would basically mean committing a crime is practically impossible as any trained Seer would be able to see exactly what happened.

The only obvious limit I can see is time - The farther back you need to see the more power and skill is required. This provides a useful limit, but still means if your Seer Police arrive on the scene pretty quickly then you're scuppered.
The only other obvious counter is to use magic to obscure the Seer's power, which requires all crimes to be committed by or aided by a mage of some sort, which isn't helpful.

So in a medieval(ish) setting would crime still be possible if such a power existed?
What limits could I put on it, or what loopholes am I missing?

Obviously smaller communities wouldn't have trained Seers unhand, but presumably any lord time figure would make it his (or her) business to obtain the services of a Seer (which aren't going to be too uncommon) to aid in the execution of justice.

Answer 1

Of course. Crime isn't going away. We've got considerable forensics abilities today, and we've still got crime. It's possible to track down people with a single dropped hair, touched object, or drop of blood/sweat. Doesn't stop people.

There's a number of practical concerns that will prevent Seers from instantly solving all crimes.

Let's run through a situation; A crime happened, you´re on the scene using Hindsight. You see the criminal. Great. Do you actually know them? Even if they were dumb enough not to wear face-covering, seeing a face doesn't instantly tell you who they are. If you don't recognize the criminal, you're stuck asking people if they know them, and unless you can take a picture of your Hindsight that's going to require descriptions, which are highly unreliable.

And then even if you know who did it; that doesn't mean the crime is solved. You still need to find that person. They might have moved to another village. They might be hiding with friends or relatives until you stop searching. Your vision abilities won't help that much in locating people.

Of course, this all assumes that there's an actual crime scene to investigate. What if someone is kidnapped? Unless you happen to know where the kidnapping took place, you have no starting point.

And then there is the last point; what if the person committing the crime can't just be brought before the judges? Even if you know who did it, and where they are, if they are the judge's son you'll have a hard time convincing the judge that a hanging is required.

And this doesn't even touch on people who don't care about being caught. Crimes of passion are commonplace.

Plenty of problems remain, so crime won't go away. It will change, most likely, but it will still be there.

Answer 2

Yes, you'll still have crime.

There's a very simple reason for this: those mages with Hindsight are going to be finite in number, and thus their time is also finite. Just look at the real world: there's only so many police officers available to investigate crimes. Magicians with this kind of power aren't going to be wasted on something as mundane as petty theft; rulers/the wealthy/etc. are going to hoard those powers for their own use, and they can offer a lot more in wages than anything the local police force might be able to pay. You might get a few mages for crime investigation in the largest cities if you're lucky, but they can't be everywhere at once. Something like murder would probably warrant such a magician's time, but they will not have the time to check out every crime.

You've also got the problem of evidence. Medieval courts probably don't have the same standards as modern courts, but they're likely going to require something more than a single person's word that Random Joe X was guilty of committing Bad Crime Y. If they're good about concealing evidence, the most you can get is suspicions without proof. In the absence of other factors (bribery, a witch hunt), that's not going to cut it.

Answer 3

If these seers are being employed by Lords, then a good lawyer could point to some conflict of interest.

Since the judge or even the police can't see what the Seer is seeing, all that they have to go on is his word. A good lawyer could try and throw some doubt on the Seer's reputation so their word won't be accepted by the judge.

Answer 4

Make it unreliable.

Don't have hindsight work like watching a video recording. Make it more like trying to recall a faint memory. Just that it isn't even your memory, but a memory of the big cosmos itself. Do you still remember exactly what you did the day a week ago? Maybe you remember some details and key events. But do you remember everything that happened that day? Would you recognize every person you saw on the train that day? Remember the license plate of every car you passed? And about those things you do remember, are you sure you remember them correctly? The memory of the cosmos might be equally patchy.

That means a hindseer might be able to pick up impressions and emotions, but they might be hard to put together. Chronology of events might get mixed up. Some details might be exceptionally clear, others very vague, completely missing or even wrong. This might give the seer a completely misleading picture of what actually happened. Experienced hindseers might be able to get more information and might be better at estimating the reliability of it. But even the best of them happen to be wrong on occasion. Just like the best foreseers tend to get proven wrong.

Another option would be to make the past just as uncertain as the future. When you look at a crime scene and try to see its past, you don't just see the timeline which actually lead to the present, but also any other hypothetical timelines which could have lead to the scene looking like this. So you might see multiple versions of how the crime happened. Now its up to you to eliminate them one after another by finding facts which contradict them.

That means a hindseer's analysis of a crime might be a hint for what to investigate, but not strong enough evidence to actually convict someone.

Answer 5

Absolutely crime would still exist, as ably covered in Erik's answer.

But there's another aspect that no one has touched upon: How about organized crime? What about corruption?

These would certainly exist, too. In fact, how exactly do you KNOW that someone is a Seer? Is there some sort of official examining board? A priesthood?

Given the medieval-ish setting, no photographs, no high-tech equipment, it seems that hind-Seers would be far more than police; they would be judges or at least "expert witnesses." Their mere affirmation that "you're guilty; they saw you do it in Hindsight" would be enough to get you imprisoned at once or executed for murder. (Sort of like the Inquisition or a Witcher or a psychiatric evaluation of insanity.)

So the justice system would rest utterly upon the honesty (and accuracy) of the hindseers. Which opens up a whole new range of plots, such as one wherein a corrupt clique of hindseers is out to "get" someone and he has to dig an old trusted hindseer out of retirement and out of hiding to clear his name and find the true perpetrator...or something. What about someone who uses various chicaneries to fraudulently pass the hindseer examining board, with no slightest hint of Talent? Lots of possibilities.

People with special perceptions and abilities are still people.

Answer 6

For starters, the answer to the question as put is that yes, there will be crime. As many others have already said, there will always be crimes of passion because, well, in those cases, you aren't thinking about the consequences of your actions. That being said, there's a really strong temporary insanity defense in this case: "Your Honor, of course I was temporarily insane when I killed my wife! I'd have to be! If I weren't, I'd know that I'd get caught!" (though that's only relevant if there's a court system which cares about such distinctions).

Now, as to premeditated crime, there are a few variables which are currently left open which influence the possible answers. Most significant are the number of hindsight seers and the difficulty curve in looking further into the past. The number of seers is needed in a per-capita or per-crime basis. In your question, you state that it is harder to look further into the past, but it is unclear how the difficulty ramps up: can the average seer see one minute, one hour, one day, one week or one month into the past?

Looking at these two variables, we have four possible scenarios:

• Many Seers / Average can look > 1 day, week, month into the past
• Few Seers / Average can look > 1 day, week, month into the past
• Many Seers / Average can look < 1 hour into the past
• Few Seers / Average can look < 1 hour into the past

Obviously, the hindsight times given above are merely representative: seers can look reasonably far into the past, or not really.

Let's go through these scenarios briefly:

Many Seers / Average can look > 1 day, week, month into the past

In this case, there probably won't be much premeditated crime.

The reason for this is that if the seers can look that far back into the past, then I disagree with the vast majority of problems raised by other answers. Seers don't need to identify the perpetrator (whether or not they are wearing a mask), since they can just follow the perpetrator back in time to their home or forwards in time to their current position (if hindsight is fixed to the seer's current position, the seer can just go "ok, the perpetrator went around that corner", walk to the corner, activate hindsight once again, and repeat the process until they're at the criminal's doorstep). Kidnappings are also not an issue: start at the victim's last known location and trace their steps to the kidnapping and all the way to their present location.

The only such crimes would be committed either by untouchables (judge's son, as others have mentioned) or people who have really dedicated themselves to pull it off: moved out of their house into a hotel with a fake name and lived there for 2 days/weeks/months in order to avoid being identified by seers hindsight-walking to their homes, committed the crime, and then made a hasty getaway out of the country, where the seers can't follow them to their current location. Sometime later, they can come back home.

There is another possibility when dealing with not-so-long-ago hindsight (a day, for example): poison. If the criminal has access to slow-acting poison, they can use it without fear of the seers, since the seers won't be able to see who poisoned the victim.

Few Seers / Average can look > 1 day, week, month into the past

In this case, the seers will be stretched thin and won't be able to investigate every crime. They will probably be put in a taskforce of sorts, focusing on high profile or otherwise important crimes. Therefore, lower level crime will still exist for the most part, while high profile crimes will probably be very few and far between, or have to be aided with magic to shield the perpetrators from hindsight.

The exceptions are mostly the same as in the previous section. Indeed, in this case, poison becomes especially handy: you can use a relatively short-acting poison so long as its symptoms can be confused with accidental or natural deaths (causes a heart attack, for instance). With few hindsight seers, the police will have a good chance of simply assuming it was a natural/accidental death and move on. Meanwhile, if there were many seers, the police might have seers do a cursory look into the victim's past just to check for such foul-play.

Many Seers / Average can look < 1 hour into the past

There probably won't be much petty crime, especially in areas near police stations. However, high profile crime probably won't be much affected, since these tend to be at least a bit thought through. If all you need to do is get an hour's head start on the police, anyone with even a modicum of discipline can probably do it. Kidnappings will probably not be affected either, since you probably can't follow the victim's footsteps in time.

Few Seers / Average can look < 1 hour into the past

In this case, the seers probably won't have much of an impact. They won't be able to stop serious crime and there aren't enough of them to make a dent on petty crime either.

Answer 7

Some problems which are not solved with Hindsight:

No light/bad lighting

Simply let the crime happen during dark night or very bad viewing conditions. Your seer knows that a crime is going on (you hear shuffling, muted screams whatever), but he cannot see in the dark. The attacker don't even need a mask. If hindsight only allows viewing, the seer is completely screwed. This can be also achieved by very bright light sources, blinding viewers or using fog/smoke.

Poisons/death traps

The victim was poisoned or killed by a death trap. You know that X persons could have built the trap or poured the poison, you are by no means smarter when your seer sees how the victim died. To prevent that the seer simply follows each suspect in hindsight until he administered the poison, only allow that dead persons can be followed or tracked in hindsight.

Perpetrator is unidentifiable.

Like all criminals now know to use gloves to prevent fingerprint, all your criminals wear masks hiding their face completely and wearing voluminous garments to hide their body form.

Seers abusing their powers/Evidence unreliable

Like all witnesses: Who says seers cannot be the bad guys, inventing wrong evidence or being coerced to accuse innocents? Another problem is the possible existence of wrong visions which cannot be discerned from the true ones.

One argument against using psychic powers during investigations (in our timeframe) is that even if they would exist, all evidence is pointing in the direction that they are highly unreliable.

Seers can only see the hindsight from the view of the victim.

It does not help if the victim is strangled from behind, knocked out or killed immediately before seeing the perpetrator.

Answer 8

First, you are detracting from farsight by letting foreseers and hindseers see things that happened or will happen elsewhere. It should take both hind and far seeing to allow some one to solve a crime without being on the scene. Foreseeing, to be reliable when used from far away, should require the same.

Now, to solve a crime just seeing might not be enough. It someone steal your wallet without you noticing in the middle of a crowd, can the mage find an angle to see who's hand at some point got inside you pocket?

Allowing hindsight to take any angle and any position might be over powered, so you could rule that the 'body' of the seer can't go inside people or rocks...

Answer 9

I suggest this, hindsight is not as simple as rolling back a film. What is happening is a magical reconstruction of information based on present information. The more complex that information, the more difficult.

An example, if you drop a vase each piece follows its own path through the air to its final resting point. Hindsight will let you watch those pieces tumble backward and reassemble into the intact form. You can now view the original in its unbroken state. Pretty simple. If you wait a week, it is more difficult simply because more information has been accumulated around each piece, and all of that must also be unraveled in the rewind. Now, add a second vase that was dropped at the same time as the first. This is more difficult to track, if you need to see both at once. There is twice the amount of important information. Add ten vases. Now its a true challenge for most mages to see each of these vases recreated.

Add one more complication: time must be viewed in reverse from the present. A mage cannot just jump an arbitrary distance back and start there. If they do not know what details to focus on, they risk not being able to hold the stream at all, there must be an initial physical thing that is the point of concentration. This means one can't just "watch" a road and see all the travelers that pass for the last hour. You may watch a pebble on that road, and see it disturbed. Then shift the focus to whomever or whatever disturbed it. You may follow that person (or wagon, or horse) backward and see where it came from, carefully checking each interaction it makes. However, if you picked the wrong pebble you may never "see" the man you were looking for, as he passed on the other side of the road and never met the one that stepped on the pebble you were watching.

This means catching a petty pickpocket is easy. You focus on the location of the victim, then his purse, then the thief as he touches it. Now you can follow the thief back to where he came from, or to where he went (moving time forward toward the present).

The result of taking it this way is two things (at least).

1. Time and complexity make it harder to see important details.
2. A mage must choose which details to focus on, and can, therefore, be misled by intentionally planted misinformation or complexity.

One way this can be exploited is that a criminal could simply put on a mask and obfuscating attire. Then, enter a crowded area and get themselves lost in the shuffle. After spending time in such chaos, say an hour or so, they then go to the area to commit the planned crime. The mage might be able to follow them backward from the actual event, but they must then expend huge amounts of power to track them within the information flood of the crowds. If the mage isn't up to it, then they won't be able to follow all the way back to when the criminal was showing their true face.

Answer 10

In my world one of the branches of magic is Sight; foresight, farsight and hindsight.

The challenges of hindsight should not any different than of foresight. While the timeline is fixed, there is significantly more information to parse, and requires intensive focus and energy to filter out the important from the mundane. Hindsight would not be like watching a movie or a video, but comes in patches (fragments of compressed and extended time) and requires the intelligence of the seer to identify what they are seeing. Imagine that time is like glass that is more substantial the closer it is to the present, but disintegrates as time goes by, with spikes surrounding strong emotional/spiritual periods (such as a murder, but not a theft by someone in control of their emotions).

Also figure out the magic ability that would block sight. While Lords are hiring Seers, criminals are hiring the "smokers" to obscure things from the magic sight (even to the point of kidnapping and human trafficking). There might be a separate magic type to obscure distance ("farsmoker") and require a "timesmoker" to obscure hindsight and/or foresight. Naturally the practice of "smoking" would be outlawed. (Personally there should be just as many smokers as there are seers to balance the magic... children of seers could be smokers or vice versa).

One possibility is that a Foreseer committing a crime could probably obscure their actions from a Hindseer (countering the future actions). On the other hand, it would be possible for a Hindseer to influence the timeline so that it is also obscured to other Hindseers by the very act of viewing the past. So in a way, the Foresight and Hindsight Seers are their own "time smokers" because a scene can usually only read a few times before static and other corruptive influences start to degrade the vision (fragments shatter). Basically all that is required to corrupt the scene is a Foreseer (before the crime) or Hindseer (after the crime) to read the scene one or more times. Obviously, the strength and power of the seer can affect the outcome with a weaker seer corrupting the scene and a strong user still able to pluck what they need. But it would be obvious to any Hindseer that the timeline was corrupted. (NOTE: it would be the time+space with a limited sphere of influence that would be corrupted/static, and no obliteration of everything that happened in the past in that space.)

BTW, it might be also interesting to have the polar of farsight... tinysight/microsight, which may also have a different method of solving crimes.

While your original question was how to make the Hindsight less powerful so that crime was not wiped out, the premise of a crime novel based on this magic would be very interesting.

Answer 11

Can your seers with hindsight interact with the past at all? Because if they can't, then your seers would have all the problems of modern-day video surveillance (as per @Alexander's comment). Surveillance is great for being able to see how a crime took place, but it does nothing to help you identify the perpetrator unless the seer himself recognizes the person's face (or he can project his hindsight for others to see).

Even if the seer had perfect vision of the past (unlike modern video surveillance), what if the perpetrator wore a mask? Presumably criminals know that seers would be able to identify them in the future, so they would take steps to disguise themselves.

And even if your seers could identify the perpetrators, it still doesn't tell you where they are now. Seers with farsight would need to know where to look to find them, so without any idea where they went after the crime was committed, they would still remain at large.

Really, the outlook for crime in your world of magic seers wouldn't look all that much different than ours, with only the logistics of crime being different (along with the standards of evidence in its courts). Most criminals get caught because of stupid mistakes, not because police are so smart. Seers being the police in your world wouldn't change that very much.

Answer 12

Use the power of

Fake news

The hindsight works best the sooner you are to the event, right? So as a criminal, if the crime is detected on time, and if they know where it happened, and if they could physically find you and if they managed to persecute you soon enough and all the other ifs, you might still be able to walk if you only stall them for long enough for the evidence about you to weaken.

How do you do that?

1. Find someone with hindsight and a sketchy character
2. Give them money
3. Have them falsely confirm your alibi and blame the crime on someone else + discredit whoever is condemning you (including if it's the judge his/her self!)
4. Maybe throw in some conspiracy theories for the hell of it
5. Stall the trial, say "we just can't know for sure what happened! So many alternative facts!"
6. Walk away happy as a clam

Fake knows doesn't hold forever, but since time is of the essence it could help. It also won't work in high profile cases where a team of well trusted hindsighters could verify exactly what happened, but it should at least give any culprit some hope of getting away with stuff given a good lawyer.

Answer 13

So the first part of solving a crime is figuring out a crime happened in the first place. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of serial criminals. It's typically broken down into how many known victims and how many possible victims were a result of that individual. The known victims are the ones the law has tried and convicted them of. The unknown victims are a result of any number of things. Typically, the killer confessing to more victims but can't or won't recall the specific details about who they are or where they are. But it could also be they only found the bodies or enough evidence to link the killer to only a handful of deaths. Sometimes, the killer never confesses and the likely victim just happened to go missing under similar circumstances during the time the victim was active but no evidence came to light about who the guy was. For similar reasons, when a person is accused of a crime that shows steps were taken to put the accused under the radar (pedophilia jumps to light, but so do scams), the police will normally send out a press release that includes potential avenues the accused could get to victims in the hopes that other potential victims can be made aware OR those close to the guy and thought of something said as suspicious can come forward.

Alternatively, crimes like espionage can go undetected for years because if your not caught the first time, it means your system was successfully not picked up. A good number of spies are only uncovered because the country that receives the information tips their hands by acting on that information. The most dangerous are those motivated by their ideology (they spy because they believe in the cause). The greatest unsung hero of D-Day was a Spanish name code named Garbo by the British, who was hired by the Germans to spy on the allies. The only problem was that from the get go, he was very much opposed to the Nazis. As soon as they hired him, he went to Britain and went straight to SIS and turned himself in. He then created an entirely fictional spy ring (called the XX ring, for the 20 fictional characters in the ring, all of whom he personally created with such attention to details, that they all had unique handwriting) and successfully convinced Hitler that D-Day was a feint attack to draw defenses from the landing sight of a second invasion force. He was never discovered and in the immediate aftermath of the war went to Spain to meet his German handler, who paid him for his work and presented him with the FREAKIN' IRON CROSS for his service to Germany during the war. He is only person to received the highest Award Declaration from both an Allied and Axis power for his service for War War II. Germany never once had any reason to doubt him, so it would have no reason to even begin to look for evidence of a crime.

Answer 14

Sights are just a flicker without date, explanation or sequence, which is either in the past or future, which can change due to certain trivial unrelated events, unless it is a major immutable node.

People who have never experienced it think it is like a Hollywood film that can be watched for as long as you want. In fact it is mostly an unsolicited flash and what you want to see cannot be accessed.

Answer 15

Of course there would still be crime! For a very simple reason: many people do not really think of the consequences of their actions. Think of teenagers shoplifting or vandalizing for fun/rebellion, of someone who's drunk or high committing some crime, of some violent person who will rape or kill anyway (even in our world, any victim of rape would easily be able to recognize the person, yet rapes happen).

And some more intelligent criminals, instead, would try to fool the system, they'd try to make crimes planning them so that they cannot be easily traced down.

Don't worry, you don't risk having a crime-free world.