> Was it actually broken?

No, but it certainly was flawed. In Anderton's case, all three precognizants saw everything about the crime except for the two to three second segment that proved Anderton was innocent. Stephen believes that Anderton was able to change what happened because he knew about the precognition; I say the pre-cogs only saw flashes of the event, missing several key moments. Given this, and the fact that in several murders the pre-cogs didn't agree on what happened, one can easily introduce reasonable doubt for all other murders PreCrime prevented. Thus, PreCrime's prisoners are released. With the politics involved, it didn't surprise me that PreCrime was totally shut down.

What bugs me about the movie is if these were the only three precognizants available, how were they going to open PreCrime units in other cities?

-FP