Policing the future, disrupting urban policy today. Predictive policing, smart city, and urban policy in Memphis (TN)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Significant resources and efforts have been devoted, especially in the USA, to develop predictive policing programs. Predictive policing is, at the same time, one of the drivers of the birth, and the ultimate material enactment of, the anticipatory logics that are central to the smart city discourse. Quite surprisingly, however, critical analyses of the smart city have remained divorced from critical criminology and police studies. To fill this gap, this article sets out the first critical, in-depth empirical discussion of Blue CRUSH, a predictive policing program developed in Memphis (TN, USA), where its implementation intersects long-term austerity for urban policy. The article, first, shows that there is no evidence of Blue CRUSH’s capacity to prevent crime, thus adding empirical material to skepticism over the role of predictive policing as a policy solution in the first place. And, second, it argues that, rather than making crime a matter of technological solutions, predictive policing shifts the politics therein – in short, it contributes to the expansion of policing into the field of urban policy at the same time as it disrupts present police work. These takeaways allow to further the critique of the salvific promises implicit in the smart city discourse.