Geolitica

In fact, the invention of policing is really about the monitoring of Black people in this country, all the way back to the kind of origin stories of the slave trade and the practice of enslavement, the system of enslavement in the United States.

And so, um, when you think about the kind of historical data that is used, and this is, this, you know, predates Flock and Ring with software like PredPol, we know that using these kinds of systems to predict where crime might happen is really about trying to contain and control different kinds of people and communities, and that has been historically kind of a- around racial discrimination and redlining and containment.

So, you know, I see these as kind of a, a newer generation of these kinds of technologies.

Again, you see them overrepresented and used to, uh, predict where crime might take place, and usually that's about particular types of crime as well.

It's sort of like, uh, there have been companies that have tried to do this before.

There's one called PredPol, which is like predictive policing, literally.

Um, that's based on just, like, crime statistics in a neighborhood, essentially.

Um, and I actually don't know the current status of this, but this is the US government doing it, the federal government working with local police.

We have to look at predictive policing.

Cash-strapped police departments across the country in places like Reading, Pennsylvania, they use software programs like PredPol.

And these are machine learning algorithms that absorb historical crime data and then draw little red squares on a city map predicting exactly where crimes are most likely to happen hour by hour.

I mean, honestly, it sounds incredibly efficient.

You're right.

There's a tool called PredPol, and this company is out of China.

They developed an AI camera, but with advanced visual analytics.

And so this camera can identify individuals that can triangulate on your face and do facial recognition, but they also look for anomalies, including gait patterns.

Yeah, pretty big.

Now, a similar tool was used in Tacoma, Washington, where they saw a 22% drop in crime.

That tool was called PredPol.

And again, it looks for anomalies of behavior.

He was really... vocal about this in his campaign saying, you know, we need to disassemble this surveillance state that has very obvious racist, regressive, classist consequences on the lives of New Yorkers and by extension, the lives of a lot of people because New York City is also this test bed for these technologies and then becomes an export industry for these technologies as well.

Like, you know, things like PredPol, one of the first predictive policing companies out there, co-founded by William Bratton, who was New York City police commissioner during the Giuliani days, really was at the forefront of broken windows theory.

If you...

If you've watched The Wire and if you listen to our Media Diet episodes on the premium feed, you'll know my wife and I are re-watching.

I don't think I had read too much about it, except I'd read bits and pieces about it, connected to very specific people.

You know, Tish, Tish's mentor, Bratton, you know, Neal.

Kelling, specific technologies, you know, PredPol, CompStat, domain awareness system.

And so I wanted, you know, the piece took many shapes as I was working on it, but I wanted to try to tell a story that said, okay, the technology layers are a very important part to hone in on because it actually communicates how hard it's going to be to, you can't, it's a much bigger beast, a much more unwieldy beast than we anticipate, right? And it's not something that can have, I'm not confident there are a lot of smart clever fixes that undermine it and that you do have to say no.