Let's do something that I actually really enjoyed. The art. The city looks amazing and really excels at convincing you of the "futuristic metropolis" setting. Characters aren't really anything new or exciting, but they look good enough.
Now, this is where we start to run into some trouble. The soundtrack was mediocre at best, nothing really memorable. I found the ending to be rather catchy, but nothing I'd listen to outside of watching this anime.
And now we get to the really messy part. The characters and plot. First off, we have the millionth iteration of "naive, idealistic rookie and cunning yet oddball partner". The side characters aren't really anything to write home about either, the senior, the loose cannon analyst and the two that get so little time to develop or act at all that they are completely generic. The amazing thing is that we actually get told part of the backstory of one character (Kunizuka), yet it doesn't really tell us anything about her except that she apparently likes music and was reluctant to join the force at first? The even more amazing thing is that we learn a lot more about the DEAD partner of another character than the LIVING current member of the team. But nothing of that matters anyway because it is never brought up again.
It's kind of frustrating looking back because the anime could have been significantly shorter if they hadn't tried giving everyone some kind of personal problem to then not resolve. Why bother making up these subplots if you only use them to pad time? For example, the senior guy is the father of one of the inspectors. They develop quite the interesting dynamic between them. How is that resolved? Senior guy fucking dies and the inspector gets to have sad 30 seconds about it. Wow. Or, one of the enforcers is actually an ex-inspector. The ex-partner of one of the inspectors, in fact. Why did he become an enforcer? Because he apparently was to good at understanding criminals and because he wanted vengeance for one of his subordinates that was murdered. This isn't actually mentioned often, it's just there to give the Enforcer guy a reason to kill the antagonist.
This also brings us to quite the gaping plot hole. The criminal coefficient of detectives apparently rises if they can effectively solve crimes by reconstructing the thoughts and emotions of suspects. Despite this, they still get punished by the system if their coefficients are too high. So, essentially, this "police" is cultivating... people that are bad at policing. This seems like a very good way to burn through manpower, which they seemingly do because it's mentioned several times that they are short of it, while not actually cracking hard cases. The policing these guys do also, in practice, consists entirely of aiming their transformer-orwell gun at a bad guy and pulling the trigger. Besides that, they are barely armed or trained in combat. And the entire plot of the anime is "what kind of implications has it if transformer-orwell gun doesn't work on someone obviously evil?". That's it. There's also the pseudo-intellectual monologuing about the nature of humans and their desire for security, or the convincing illusion thereof, but that feels kind of comical when your supposedly perfect system sees nothing wrong it someone being beaten to death with a hammer right in front of it. So in addition to the system not being able to detect ONGOING crimes purely by the action, it actively burns out the exact kind of people it employs to deal with it's imperfections. Doesn't sound like a very good recipe for long term stability to me. Especially since the "police" roboters you sometimes see appear to be nothing but demeaning trash cans without any actual means to fight crime.
Unto my next point. Demographics. It's made rather obvious that people that have not committed any kind of crime can end up flagged as latent criminals and thusly be treated as less than human and be possibly restrained in "rehabilitation" that, from what we see on screen, seem to work contrary to what they are supposed to do by isolating people in featureless rooms and leaving them to themselves. This includes victims of crimes and minors of any age. To make this shorter, you could end up in a hellish facility seemingly designed to mentally torture you through no fault of your own. And since it's mentioned that these facilities have horrible success rates, wouldn't that mean that you are locking up an ever increasing number of people for literally no reason? Wouldn't people start to notice that people rarely, if ever, return from their rehabilitation? And since you are more likely to end up in one of these facilities if you work in a high-stress environment, isn't this society burning out their best and brightest at an alarming rate for an arbitrary number that seems to only be tangentially related to someone's ability or willingness to commit crimes?
And since the Sybil system is so obviously tyrannical, dictating nearly ever aspect of a citizens life, how come people agreed to it? In Japan, one of the currently safest nations on earth, of all places? And why aren't they resisting it? Even if the answer to the former question is just "conditioning", why didn't they resist it when it was still being implemented? This system abolished most academia overnight. You know, those people with the biggest understanding of the systems implications and what it would mean for society, and the mechanics that keep said society working (agriculture, mechanics, etc..)? Later in the anime we discover that a) those academists are extremely unhappy with the state of the world and b) they have access to apparently encrypted mass communications. I couldn't dream up a better breeding ground for an inssurection if I tried. And, as if to taunt the described people with possibly anti-state tendencies, none of the critical infrastructure seems to be meaningfully guarded. In combination with the desperately understaffed security forces, the state that is described as more stable than ever before by the anime should have collapsed years ago.
And as if understaffed security forces, the angering of the people most able to bring the state down and an obviously tyrannical government that isn't all that good at doing the very thing it was introduced to do wasn't enough, here come the "criminally asymptomatic". People whose coefficient and psycho-pass can't be decisively measured. So, essentially, people who can do whatever the hell they want because there is no judicial system anymore to judge them even if they were caught. The occurrence rate of them is determined to be 1 in 2 million. And you're telling me that among the massive amount of people that have nothing to lose, and are capable of seriously impairing the state, there's not a single one among them that can also act with impunity because of that neural oddity? To show you how ridiculous all of this is, let's examine some of the many, many ways you could bring the Sybil System down with.
1) Incite riots to destroy the trust the population has in Sybil.
This is done in the anime. The only reason it doesn't work as intended is because it seems people in future Japan can go from bashing each others head in with garden tools on a massive scale to regular, unspectacular day without a hitch.
2) Deploy jamming devices around the city.
This would be deadly in a modern city and could cause potentially billions in lost revenues. All with a few simply, widely available electronics components and amateur knowledge on how to use them. There are manuals online on how to build one. And if that's the kind of damage they can do in a current city, what do you reckon they'd do to a city where EVERYTHING is completely dependent on constant, wireless connection to the internet? This isn't even hard, as it's acknowledged by the anime that there are no scanners in homes and that you can avoid the public ones if you put effort in.
3) Snip telephone/power cables
The more primitive version of the above, with most of the same effects.
And yet, nobody has even attempted to do any of this, and more? The only thing you need to do is interrupt as many peoples routine as possible, because the system is likely not equipped or prepared to deal with you. But I don't have a fundamental problem with unrealisitc scenarios in anime. I have a with said fundamentally problems being made into plot points, and yet magically irrelevant at all other times.
Phew, rant over. Overall I enjoyed this anime while watching despite all it's flaws. It's by no means great. Or memorable. It's something that serves well as a way to spend time, nothing more, nothing less.
