Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work

Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese

Egbert, Simon; Leese, Matthias (2021): Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work. London/New York: Routledge.

This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on thee years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices.

The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work.

Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

Discrimination in Predictive Policing. The Myth of Objectivity and the Need for STS-Analysis

Simon Egbert and Monique Mann

Egbert, Simon; Mann, Monique: Discrimination in Predictive Policing. The Myth of Objectivity and the Need for STS-Analysis. In: Badalič, Vasja; Završnik, Aleš (Hrsg.): Automating Crime Prevention, Surveillance, and Military Operations. Cham: Springer, 25-46.

This chapter examines various levels of human and non-human-mediated forms of bias in place-based predictive policing that may lead to discriminatory outcomes. Informed by science and technology studies (STS), and drawing on empirical data on the implementation and utilization of crime prediction software in Germany and Switzerland, we grasp predictive policing as a socio-technical assemblage, encompassing not only the technical predictions themselves but also the enactment of the predictions on the street level by police—which can also have serious ramifications including discrimination. Further, we consider the broader socio-political and historical contexts of these predictive technologies and dispute technocentric accounts of discrimination in predictive policing. Rather, we argue for greater attention to be paid to the socio-political and historical contexts from which such technologies and practices emerge. Hence, we contend that STS approaches are vital for an appropriate understanding of the discriminatory potency of (place-based) predictive policing, as we need to decenter technology in accounts of discrimination in predictive policing. Our argument unfolds across four steps. First, we present a short introduction to predictive policing and highlight its socio-technical nature. Second, we analyze the main dimensions of discrimination sources in place-based predictive policing. Third, we argue for the need to decenter technology and call for an appreciation of broader socio-political and historical perspectives in the analysis of predictive policing. Fourth and finally, we argue for the need to incorporate science and technology studies (STS) into the analysis of the discriminatory potential of predictive policing.

Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns

Mareile Kaufmann, Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese

Kaufmann, Mareile; Egbert, Simon; Leese, Matthias (2019): Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns. In: The British Journal of Criminology 59 (3), 674-692.

Patterns are the epistemological core of predictive policing. With the move towards digital prediction tools, the authority of the pattern is rearticulated and reinforced in police work. Based on empirical research about predictive policing software and practices, this article puts the authority of patterns into perspective. Introducing four ideal-typical styles of pattern identification, we illustrate that patterns are not based on a singular logic, but on varying rationalities that give form to and formalize different understandings about crime. Yet, patterns render such different modes of reasoning about crime, and the way in which they feed back into policing cultures, opaque. Ultimately, this invites a stronger reflection about the political nature of patterns.

Predictive Policing: not yet, but soon preemptive?

Simon Egbert and Susanne Krasmann

Egbert, Simon; Krasmann, Susanne (2020): Predictive Policing: not yet, but soon preemptive? In: Policing and Society 30 (8): 905-919

For several years now, crime prediction software operating on the basis of data analysis and algorithmic pattern detection has been employed by police departments throughout the world. As these technologies aim at forestalling criminal events, they may aptly be understood as elements of preventive strategies. Do they also initiate a logic of preemptive policing, as several authors have suggested? Using the example of crime prediction software that is used in German-speaking countries, the article shows how current forms of predictive policing echo classical modes of risk calculation: usually employed in connection with domestic burglary, they help police to identify potential high-risk areas by extrapolating past crime patterns into the future. However, preemptive elements also emerge, to the extent that the software fosters ‘possibilistic’ thinking in police operations. Moreover, current advances in crime prediction technologies give us a quite different picture of a probable future of preemptive policing. Following a general trend of data-driven government that draws on self-learning algorithms and heterogeneous data sources, crime prediction software will likely be integrated into assemblages of predictive technologies where criminal events are indeed foreclosed before they can unfold and emerge, implying preemptive police action.

Insurance as Business of Imagination

Alberto Cevolini

Despite the fact that insurance is a ubiquitous core institution of modern society, a sociological theory of insurance does not yet exist. This article aims at suggesting some hypotheses which can help filling the gap. Insurance has been pertinently defined as “the archetype of modernist governance of the future”. Consequently, a sociological research on insurance institution should answer three preliminary questions: First, when we talk about the future, what are we actually talking about? Second, how is it possible to govern the future in the present? Finally, what is the modernity of this modernist governance of the future, and why does insurance represent its archetype? Moving from a comparison between prudence and providence, it is suggested that insurance turns uncertainty into possibilities. In this way, the decision-maker who takes out insurance can plan for the planningness of the future – that is, whatever happens, he relies on an open future. This article suggests, eventually, that the theory of evolution is conceptually well equipped to explain why an institution that at the beginning (that is, in the late Middle Ages) was regarded as a form of deviation has become normal over time.

CEVOLINI, A. (2019). Insurance as a business of imagination. Sociologia e Politiche Sociali 22(2): 105–125

Der Preis der Hoffnung

Alberto Cevolini

Eine Merkwürdigkeit von Evolution liegt darin, dass Systemanpassung mit einer Steigerung von Komplexität und Unsicherheit einhergeht. Ein gesellschaftliches Beispiel dafür ist das Versicherungswesen. Seine Funktion besteht nicht darin, Sicherheit zu produzieren, sondern eher darin, die selbsterzeugte Ungewissheit auszudehnen, die die Gesellschaft durch Entscheidungen absorbieren kann. Die Entscheidung dient nach wie vor dazu, Zeit zu konstruieren, das heißt Vergangenheit und Zukunft in einer für den Entscheider verbindlichen Weise zu aggregieren, ohne die Zeit lediglich ablaufen zu lassen. Dadurch wird in erster Linie möglich, unendlich viele Zeitzäsuren neu zu kombinieren. Ungewissheit wird erzeugt, indem die Risikobedingungen jeweils präzisiert werden, die die Versicherung handzuhaben vermag. Zu diesem Zweck zieht man den Konsensualvertrag heran. Das Wesen der Versicherung lässt sich damit als eine Präzisierung zugunsten der Ausdehnung der in der Gesellschaft selbsterzeugten Ungewissheit beschreiben.

CEVOLINI, A. (2014). Der Preis der Hoffnung. In: Cevolini, A. (ed) Die Ordnung des Kontingenten. Innovation und Gesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19235-2_8