Predictive policingTechnology Can’t Predict Crime, It Can Only Weaponize Proximity to Policing

By Matthew Guariglia

Published 8 September 2020

Predictive policing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police focus their efforts in one neighborhood and arrest dozens of people there during the span of a week, the data will reflect that area as a hotbed of criminal activity. The system also considers only reported crime, which means that neighborhoods and communities where the police are called more often might see a higher likelihood of having predictive policing technology concentrate resources there.

In June 2020, Santa Cruz, California became the first city in the United States to ban municipal use of predictive policing, a method of deploying law enforcement resources according to data-driven analytics that supposedly are able to predict perpetrators, victims, or locations of future crimes. Especially interesting is that Santa Cruz was one of the first cities in the country to experiment with the technology when it piloted, and then adopted, a predictive policing program in 2011. That program used historic and current crime data to break down some areas of the city into 500 foot by 500 foot blocks in order to pinpoint locations that were likely to be the scene of future crimes. However, after nine years, the city council voted unanimously to ban it over fears of how it perpetuated racial inequality. 

Predictive policing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police focus their efforts in one neighborhood and arrest dozens of people there during the span of a week, the data will reflect that area as a hotbed of criminal activity. The system also considers only reported crime, which means that neighborhoods and communities where the police are called more often might see a higher likelihood of having predictive policing technology concentrate resources there. This system is tailor-made to further victimize communities that are already overpoliced—namely, communities of color, unhoused individuals, and immigrants—by using the cloak of scientific legitimacy and the supposed unbiased nature of data. 

Santa Cruz’s experiment, and eventual banning of the technology is a lesson to the rest of the country: technology is not a substitute for community engagement and holistic crime reduction measures. The more police departments rely on technology to dictate where to focus efforts and who to be suspicious of, the more harm those departments will cause to vulnerable communities. That’s why police departments should be banned from using supposedly data-informed algorithms to inform which communities, and even which people, should receive the lion’s share of policing and criminalization. 

What Is Predictive Policing?
The Santa Cruz ordinance banning predictive policing defines the technology as “means software that is used to predict information or trends about crime or criminality in the past or future, including but not limited to the characteristics or profile of any person(s) likely to commit a crime, the identity of any person(s) likely to commit crime, the locations or frequency of crime, or the person(s) impacted by predicted crime.”