The text of the short story used to create this guide was taken from: Dick, Philip K. The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories. Citadel Press, 1987. The story was originally published in Fantastic Universe, 1956.

The story is divided into ten numbered sections which together follow protagonist John Anderton over the course of a single 24-hour period. Anderton, the middle-aged Commissioner and former founder of the police force known as Precrime, lives in a version of New York City that has been altered, in the world of the story, by war and by the existence of Precrime, which has effectively abolished all crime for nearly thirty years.

Anderton’s achievement was to discover a way for mutant beings with the ability to see the future known as “precogs” to be used for crime prevention. In the first section of the story, Anderton explains some of Precrime’s inner workings to a new hire named Ed Witwer, who is slated to replace Anderton as Commissioner whenever he chooses to retire. Anderton shows Witwer the way that the predictions made by the precogs appear on printed cards, and is alarmed to find that today’s card predicts Anderton himself to commit a murder sometime over the next week.

Anderton’s discomfort is noticed by his wife, Lisa. Anderton immediately suspects her as potentially being a part of an effort by Witwer to frame him as a would-be murderer. If Anderton were removed to the detention camp where would-be criminals are taken, Witwer would immediately take over his job. However, Lisa informs him that his theory has one significant flaw: it is not Witwer that Anderton is predicted to murder, but rather a man named Leopold Kaplan, whom Anderton has never heard of.

When Anderton returns to his house to pack and flee Earth for a different planet, he is kidnapped and brought before Leopold Kaplan himself, a retired Army general. Kaplan became aware of the predicted murder because the Army receives a duplicate set of cards, the same as Precrime, as a part of a system of checks and balances. When Kaplan’s agents send Anderton back to Precrime to be apprehended and placed in the detention camp, their car is ambushed, and Anderton is freed by a man named Fleming, who gives him money and identification that Anderton can use to hide out until the end of the week. Fleming states that he is part of a secret police force that polices the police, and tells Anderton that his wife Lisa is responsible for framing him.

While in hiding, Anderton hears on the radio that in his case, there was a special circumstance. Whereas the predictions delivered by the three precogs tend to agree, in this case, one of the three precogs told a different story than the other two. This titular minority report could have information revealing that Anderton is not going to commit the murder. Anderton uses his contacts with a Precrime assistant to break back into the facility and make a copy of the minority report, which does prove him to be innocent of any future crime. Lisa helps him escape the facility in a plane, where they are ambushed by Fleming.

Anderton and Lisa incapacitate Fleming and discover that he was working for Kaplan all along. Though it was difficult to know who to trust, at first, Anderton now knows his fellow Precrime operatives—Witwer and his wife Lisa—to be trustworthy and working to protect him, whereas Kaplan and the Army group that he represents are trying to seize total police power by discrediting Precrime. Anderton is in a double bind: if the minority report is correct, then Anderton was never guilty of any future crime, and thus Precrime is a broken system that has been imprisoning innocent people. But if the minority report is incorrect, then Anderton is going to murder Leopold Kaplan and likely receive life imprisonment.

Anderton returns to Precrime and takes a closer look at the data from the two precogs who combined to make the majority report. He finds something interesting, but before he can share it with Lisa and Witwer, the Precrime group discover that the Army is putting on a rally outside the building. Kaplan makes a speech with Anderton at his side as visual proof that even though the one man had been predicted to murder the other, the existence of the minority report proves that Precrime is debunked and should be abolished. Anderton, in response, takes out a pistol, kills Kaplan, and escapes.

In the end, Witwer helps Anderton’s sentence get commuted down from life imprisonment to exile on a different planet. Anderton explains to Witwer that in this case, there was not one minority report but three, with each of the precogs seeing a different time path. The only reason why this case was different than any other of the many crimes that the precogs have prevented was because Anderton was able to see three different individual reports with enough time to change his mind. The system of Precrime is perfect, with only one man—the Precrime Commissioner—having the potential to mess things up.