The machine that ate bad people: The ontopolitics of the precrime assemblage

Mantello, Peter

doi:10.1177/2053951716682538

Cited by 39 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Other works that have already been published have studied the role of algorithms and data in the constitution of insecure and criminal futures (Amoore and Raley, 2017; Aradau and Blanke, 2017;Kaufmann, 2018, often with a critical edge that foregrounds potential issues of discrimination, profiling, and social sorting vis-à-vis digitized and automated modes of policing (van Brakel and de Hert, 2011;Mantello, 2016;McCulloch and Wilson, 2016;van Brakel, 2016;Andrejevic, 2017;Sanders and Condon, 2017;Sanders and Sheptycki, 2017;Bennett Moses and Chan, 2018;. These important literatures shed light on the ways in which data and algorithms can be mobilized in ways that create concerns from ethical and legal perspectives, and their warning calls resonate well within debates about how worrying developments in policing, law enforcement, and criminal justice might be curbed.…”

Section: Criminal Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criminal Futures

Egbert¹,

Leese²

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 three 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.

show abstract

Section: Criminal Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criminal Futures

Egbert¹,

Leese²

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The future-oriented risk management strategies of predictive policing are less novel than many observers would likely concede (e.g., Mantello 2016). Modern "liberal consent policing" has always involved geographies of preemption and anticipation (Anderson 2010;Massumi 2007) as a means to prevent crime and to govern racialized populations (De Lint 2000;Hartman 1997;Wood 2009).…”

Section: The Patrol As Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive Policing for Reform? Indeterminacy and Intervention in Big Data Policing

Shapiro

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence are applied widely across law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system. Despite criticism that such tools reinforce inequality and structural discrimination, proponents insist that they will nonetheless improve the equality and fairness of outcomes by countering humans’ biased or capricious decision-making. How can predictive analytics be understood simultaneously as a source of, and solution to, discrimination and bias in criminal justice and law enforcement? The article provides a framework for understanding the techno-political gambit of predictive policing as a mechanism of police reform—a discourse that I call “predictive policing for reform.” Focusing specifically on geospatial predictive policing systems, I argue that “predictive policing for reform” should be seen as a flawed attempt to rationalize police patrols through an algorithmic remediation of patrol geographies. The attempt is flawed because predictive systems operate on the sociotechnical practices of police patrols, which are themselves contradictory enactments of the state’s power to distribute safety and harm. The ambiguities and contradictions of the patrol are not resolved through algorithmic remediation. Instead, they lead to new indeterminacies, trade-offs, and experimentations based on unfalsifiable claims. I detail these through a discussion of predictive policing firm HunchLab’s use of predictive analytics to rationalize patrols and mitigate bias. Understanding how the “predictive policing for reform” discourse is operationalized as a series of technical fixes that rely on the production of indeterminacies allows for a more nuanced critique of predictive policing.

show abstract

“…Not only are virtual worlds important in individual terms, as in games played alone, but also the social aspects of the virtual worlds impose themselves on the sociability of the 'real' world. 'Likes' in Facebook and 'tweets' in Twitter have real implications, that is, implications in the world of working qua paramount reality, as does the already massively harnessed logic of games (Mantello 2016). Virtual worlds move increasing amounts of -virtual and real -money as well and increasing number of people work exclusively within virtual words, not to mention the proliferation of virtual worlds in the working life (Villadsen 2016).…”

Section: Virtual Worlds As Part Of the World Of Workingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtualization of the life-world

Ollinaho

2018

Hum Stud

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The diffusion of technological artifacts, in particular, devices of communication and the Internet have transformed the life-world of essentially everyone living in a modern society. In the past few years our everyday, including livelihoods, has seen a proliferation of activities within virtual worlds, such as games and virtual social networks. We can now live and experience actively in different virtual realms, as compared to being mere passive receivers in the era of television and radio. This has direct implications in what is inherently relevant for people and, in consequence, we have to take such transformation in account also in conceptual terms. The main implication to the conceptual palette of phenomenological sociology is that due to virtualization, we can no more equate the paramount reality as the zone of primary relevance. The paramount reality as conceived as the sensorily perceivable, physical world of concrete objects is increasingly far from being equated to the zone of primary relevance; that part of the world within our reach which we can immediately observe and also at least partially dominate. It is furthermore argued that the ongoing virtualization of societies urges us to conceive virtual worlds as transforming the subuniverse of the world of working instead of seeing virtual worlds merely as other finite provinces of meaning. Based on Alfred Schütz's work, this essay conceptually scrutinizes virtual worlds with an aim to clarify what is at stake with the virtualization of the modern society.

show abstract

The machine that ate bad people: The ontopolitics of the precrime assemblage

Cited by 39 publications

References 16 publications

Criminal Futures

Criminal Futures

Predictive Policing for Reform? Indeterminacy and Intervention in Big Data Policing

Virtualization of the life-world

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About