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19-11-2018 | Original Paper

Algorithmic paranoia: the temporal governmentality of predictive policing

Author: Bonnie Sheehey

Published in: Ethics and Information Technology | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

In light of the recent emergence of predictive techniques in law enforcement to forecast crimes before they occur, this paper examines the temporal operation of power exercised by predictive policing algorithms. I argue that predictive policing exercises power through a paranoid style that constitutes a form of temporal governmentality. Temporality is especially pertinent to understanding what is ethically at stake in predictive policing as it is continuous with a historical racialized practice of organizing, managing, controlling, and stealing time. After first clarifying the concept of temporal governmentality, I apply this lens to Chicago Police Department’s Strategic Subject List. This predictive algorithm operates, I argue, through a paranoid logic that aims to preempt future possibilities of crime on the basis of a criminal past codified in historical crime data.

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Pearsall (2009), p. 16.

Robinson and Koepke (2016).

Ibid., 2.

For a helpful summary of the differences between place-based and person-based predictive systems, see Ferguson (2017). Advocates of place-based programs defend these as less problematic than their person-based counterparts insofar as they target locations of possible crime rather than subjects of future crime. See Beck and McCue (2009). Advocates for person-based systems have argued that these types of programs are more effective as predictive tools for targeting specific kinds of crime in a city.

For a brief pre-history of predictive policing, see Wilson (2018) in Završnik (2018).

Cathy O’Neil provocatively describes predictive policing as a “weapon of math destruction”—a mathematical model that has harmful effects on precarious social groups. See O’Neil (2016), p. 3.

See Amoore (2013), Gillespie (2014), Introna (2016), and Beer (2009, 2017). For a connected discussion of algorithms as value-laden, see Friedman and Nissenbaum (1996), Kraemer et al. (2011), and Mittelstadt et al. (2016).

See Amoore (2013), Esposito (2015), and Ananny (2016).

See McCulloch and Wilson (2016), Robinson and Koepke (2016), O’Neil (2016), and Ferguson (2017).

See https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/925846/download and https://mijente.net/2017/12/04/chicago-gang-database-targets-black-latino-men-infographics/.

See Zedner (2007), p. 262, Lyon (2014), p. 6. McCulloch and Wilson (2016), p. 3.

See O’Neil (2016), p. 86 and Alexander (2012). A range of scholars emphasize the mutually constitutive relationship between policing and race in the U.S., noting the way in which policing has been historically central for the formation and maintenance of racial hierarchies. Coramae Richey Mann, for instance, argues that policing in the U.S. has its roots in slavery, with slave patrols constituting the first state-sponsored police forces. See Mann (1993), pp. 165, 195. See also Adamson (1983), Russell (1998), and Bass (2001).

See Ziewitz (2016), p. 10.

See Gillespie (2016), pp. 19–22 and Ananny (2016), p. 97.

See Gillespie (2016), pp. 19, 26.

Foucault (1997), p. xx.

See Introna (2016), p. 19.

Foucault (2004/2008), pp. 12–13.

See Collier (2009), p. 96.

See Gordon (1991), Lemke (2001), and Rose et al. (2006).

See Foucault (2004/2008), p. 19.

Foucault (1975/1997, p. 27a.

See Foucault (1975/1997, 1976/1978).

Introna (2016), p. 28. Foucault refers to the exercise of power as a “conduct of conducts” (conduire des conduites) in a 1978 essay translated from the French as “How is Power Exercised?” See Foucault (1978, 2000), p. 341.

Beer (2017), p. 9.

See Harcourt (2007), Amoore (2013), Gillespie (2014), and Beer (2017).

See Gillespie (2014).

See Cheney-Lippold (2011), Bucher (2012), and Amoore (2013), respectively.

Foucault (1975/1997).

Foucault (1975/1997), p. 200.

Ibid., 201.

I follow scholars like Bucher (2012) and Ananny and Crawford (2016) who have shown the limits of an analytic of visibility and an accompanying ethics of transparency to the critical study of algorithms. Bucher (2012) shows how the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm works differently from the Panoptic form of surveillance insofar as it imposes a ‘threat of invisibility’ on users. Ananny and Crawford (2016) explore the limits of the ideal of transparency for understanding governing algorithmic systems and for holding these systems accountable.

See Esposito (2015), pp. 93–94 and Amoore (2013), p. 9. Where these scholars tend to focus on the temporality of predictive algorithms more generally, my own analysis is more attentive to how temporality is racialized in the specific case of predictive policing algorithms like the SSL.

This performative understanding of time is inspired by Bruno Latour. See Latour (1988), pp. 50, 165.

Mills (2014), p. 28.

Ibid.

Ibid., 31.

See Maguire (2000).

This reactive style of policing is at work in disciplinary power, which proactively shapes the prisoner only after it first situated them as a prisoner by reacting to their crime. Disciplinary power thus does not capture the temporal governmentality of predictive policing insofar as it is reactive to crime where predictive policing is proactive.

See NIJ (2009), pp. 3–4 and Bratton et al. (2009), pp. 1–4.

Beck and McCue (2009), pp. 20, italics added.

Pearsall (2009), p. 17.

See https://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/what-gets-people-on-watch-list-chicago-police-fought-to-keep-secret-watchdogs/ and https://medium.com/equal-future/how-strategic-is-chicagos-strategic-subjects-list-upturn-investigates-9e5b4b235a7c.

See Kaplan (2017), available at https://southsideweekly.com/predictive-policing-long-road-transparency/.

See https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Strategic-Subject-List/4aki-r3np.

Chicago Police Department (2016), p. 1, available at http://directives.chicagopolice.org/directives/data/a7a57b85-155e9f4b-50c15-5e9f-7742e3ac8b0ab2d3.html.

See https://medium.com/equal-future/how-strategic-is-chicagos-strategic-subjects-list-upturn-investigates-9e5b4b235a7c.

https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Strategic-Subject-List/4aki-r3np.

Ibid.

https://southsideweekly.com/predictive-policing-long-road-transparency/. See also https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/upshot/what-an-algorithm-reveals-about-life-on-chicagos-high-risk-list.html?_r=0.

See Chicago Police Department, Special Order S09-11 (2016), p. 1.

Ibid., 1–2.

Chicago Police Department (2015), p. 1, available at http://directives.chicagopolice.org/directives/data/a7a57bf0-1456faf9-bfa14-570a-a2deebf33c56ae59.html.

Ibid.

Ibid. The Custom Notifications directive does not disambiguate between what counts as “victimization” or “engagement” in criminal activity, but rather treats these as equal in the process of notifying subjects. Between 2013 and 2016, the CPD delivered roughly 1400 custom notifications. See Martinez (2016), http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/05/31/going-inside-the-chicago-police-departments-strategic-subject-list/ and Posadas (2017), https://medium.com/equal-future/how-strategic-is-chicagos-strategic-subjects-list-upturn-investigates-9e5b4b235a7c.

Chicago Police Department, Special order S10-05 (2015), p. 2.

Ibid., 3.

Amoore links this preemptive activity of risk-assessment algorithms with the strategy of juridical decision associated with sovereign power. See Amoore (2013), pp. 41, 82–83.

While the continual revision of the SSL might seem to challenge this preemptive activity, it is ultimately updated in order to improve the algorithm’s predictive power, and hence to better preempt future crime. The idea here is that preemption contributes to the aim of predictive policing technologies and guides their revisions even when (or especially when) they are not successful in preempting crime.

This marks a difference between Amoore’s account of preemption in predictive algorithms and my own insofar as I understand preemption to be racialized in the case of policing algorithms like the SSL. While Amoore presents preemption as a general feature of risk-assessment algorithms that appears to apply equally to all subjects, my own view is that preemption is differentially applied to racialized subjects, and thus cannot be fully understood without considering how it is entangled with a racial politics of time.

See Coates (2015). Coates is here mimicking the title of Richard Hofstadter’s influential 1963 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” See Hofstadter (1965).

Sedgwick (2003), p. 130, italics added.

Ibid., 131, italics added.

Saunders et al. (2016), p. 364. This study also found that “at-risk individuals were not more or less likely to become victims of a homicide or shooting as a result of the SSL, and this is further supported by city-level analysis finding no effect on the city homicide trend.” (Ibid.)

Ferguson (2017), p. 40 and Davey (2016) available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/armed-with-data-chicago-police-try-to-predict-who-may-shoot-or-be-shot.html.

See https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Strategic-Subject-List-Dashboard/wgnt-sjgb. Another study found that over 50% of Black men in Chicago between the ages of 20–29 have an SSL score. See Kunichoff and Sier (2017), available at http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/August-2017/Chicago-Police-Strategic-Subject-List/. While the SSL algorithm does not explicitly use race to calculate risk scores, the publically available data set from 2012 to 2016 identifies subjects with demographic variables like race and gender.

Chicago Police Department, Special order S10-05 (2015), p. 2. Available at http://directives.chicagopolice.org/directives/data/a7a57bf0-1456faf9-bfa14-570a-a2deebf33c56ae59.html.

See https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Strategic-Subject-List/4aki-r3np.

Moses and Chan (2016), p. 4.

See Gitelman (2013), p. 2.

Ferguson (2017), p. 47.

As historian Daniel Rosenberg reminds us, ‘data’ is the plural form of the Latin ‘datum,’ the past participle of the verb ‘dare’—to give. Hence, the plural ‘data’ and the singular ‘datum’ literally mean “something given” or “something taken for granted.” See Rosenberg in Gitelman (2013), p. 18.

See McCulloch and Wilson (2016), p. 2, Lyon (2014), p. 6, and Zedner (2007), p. 262.

As Barocas and Selbst observe in connection with data mining, “Data mining can reproduce existing patterns of discrimination, inherit the prejudice of prior decision makers, or simply reflect the widespread biases that persist in society.” See Barocas and Selbst (2016), p. 674.

According to a 2017 investigation by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, patterns of racially discriminatory conduct pervade the Chicago Police Department. See USDJ Civil Rights Division 2017, 15, available at https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/925846/download and https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Strategic-Subject-List-Dashboard/wgnt-sjgb.

See Završnik (2018), p. 12.

Mills (2014), p. 28.

Foucault (2000), p. 341.

Coates (2015), p. 91, italics added.

See Cooper (2017), available at https://www.ted.com/talks/brittney_cooper_the_racial_politics_of_time.

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Title: Algorithmic paranoia: the temporal governmentality of predictive policing
Author: Bonnie Sheehey
Publication date: 19-11-2018
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Ethics and Information Technology / Issue 1/2019
Print ISSN: 1388-1957
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8439
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9489-x

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