A Police Team Hunts Future Criminals in Psycho-Pass, Prime Video’s 3-Season Gritty Crime Thriller and Perfect NCIS Replacement

A darker crime system

After more than two decades and over 500 episodes, NCIS has built a following with weekly investigations and its Major Case Response Team. Psycho-Pass takes a different path, imagining a future Japan where the government uses the Sibyl System to monitor citizens’ mental states, stress levels and personalities.

The system assigns people a Crime Coefficient to estimate their chance of becoming criminals. Public Safety Bureau investigators use Dominator handguns that can arrest or execute suspects according to that score, sometimes before an offense has occurred. The result is detective work shaped by a troubling view of justice.

Akane joins Division One

The unit includes Inspectors, who oversee investigations, and Enforcers, latent criminals with Crime Coefficients above 100 who are released from lockup to help pursue suspects. Their Dominators can shift from a Non-Lethal Paralyzer to a Lethal Eliminator, depending on a person’s score.

Justice and human judgment

On her first night, Akane sees a terrified hostage marked for execution after trauma pushes her score into the lethal range. Akane stops her lead Enforcer, Shinya Kogami, from firing, setting up the series’ conflict between machine-made decisions and human judgment.

The team also includes forensic analyst Shion Karanomori and experienced officer Tomomi Masaoka. Kogami uses his instincts to understand suspects, while each member contributes a different skill to the investigations.

Familiar procedural, harsher stakes

Psycho-Pass keeps the team investigations, evidence analysis and pursuit of dangerous criminals that draw viewers to crime procedurals. But instead of focusing only on crimes after they happen, the series also follows the system’s efforts to identify people it believes may offend.

Season 1’s Shogo Makishima provides a recurring villain. The series has a TV-MA rating and includes brutal murders, graphic violence and disturbing scenes. Its three seasons give its cases and characters room to develop, while making the show considerably darker than NCIS.