How Predictive Policing Is Reshaping Law Enforcement:
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Stimmel, Carol L.
Title Proper by Another Author
Three Essays
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Murphy, James T.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Clark University
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2020
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
224
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
Clark University
Text preceding or following the note
2020
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
The three papers in this dissertation provide a fresh critique of the heavily contested predictive policing project; championed by law enforcement as effective, efficient, and unbiased technology designed to improve and reform police practices, yet criticized by academics, civil libertarians, and in popular media as flawed, defective, or dystopian. These arguments often overlook how the encoded strategies and prescriptions in its algorithms are shaped by entanglements with economic, social, and political forces. To more fully understand how predictive policing came to be, the social construction of its underlying logic, and its ongoing justification as a sociotechnical project, this dissertation conceptualizes predictive policing as an imagined social order where the promise of public safety depends on technoscientific innovation to simultaneously advance law enforcement capacities while reforming illegitimate policing practices. Focusing on the case of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the author conducts an in-depth examination of policing practices, policy documents, national and local narratives about crime and policing, and broad public debates over technology and policing to clarify the development, acceptance, and diffusion of predictive policing imaginaries in the city. The study extends and strengthens the sociotechnical imaginaries framework to support a rigorous multiscalar examination of the topic including its historical antecedents, and at the national and local levels, to robustly describe the predictive policing project. Further, to examine how the technology may be altering or intensifying certain police practices, Actor-Network Theory is deployed to assess shifting power relations when a surveillance device that enhances predictive policing capacity is enters the advanced policing milieu. This conceptual approach helps this dissertation expose a pattern of properties and forces which have been formative to the totalizing predictive policing project, as well as to further explicate how the project is shaped in a local context. The study concludes that predictive policing does not represent an essential shift in law enforcement attitudes, values, or beliefs of the sort that might free policing from the problems of human bias or violence once its technical issues are resolved; rather, as a project, it algorithmically reproduces longstanding classifying philosophies related to identifying criminal individuals and criminal places on technoscientific terms.