Policing is an Information Business

A multi-billion-dollar industry of data-driven policing technology includes dozens of mapping, surveillance, and data-analysis tools, each claiming to hone in on crime at ever-finer grain. But as data and infrastructure writer Ingrid Burrington argues, these technologies represent less a science for the provision of safety, and more a highly effective sales pitch for a management model born in the zero tolerance Giuliani era. Since the early 1990s, when precinct commanders pushed pins into paper maps, police in New York have contended that if they can track crime, then they can predict it, and therefore prevent it. The maps they’ve made have monopolized media narratives, and shaped the lives of those who live within their frames. The authors of CompStat now export their methods around the world. Business is good for those technology vendors and consultants who sell crime- and fear-reduction as a customer service. But who’s buying? More than a set of tools, crime mappers hawk a model of a future world where the cost of guaranteed order would be accountability to the public.