Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible Preemption

Chapter author: Andrea Miller

Page author: Chance Gamble

Summary
Andrea Miller writes about the intersections of preemption, policing, space, race, and technology in this chapter of Benjamin’s collection. She defines preemption as “actions in the present that work to contain and suppress perceived threats in an imagined future” (86). She focuses on the Atlanta Police Department’s use of predictive analytics to examine how “predictive policing in Atlanta works to produce material and imagined zones of environmental carcerality for racialized and poor persons: fixing, tracking, and containing circuits of mobility and dwelling” (86). Her argument is situated within discourses of imperialism, racist and anti-racist theory, and colonialism.

Miller first develops her theoretical base by defining “policing as a set of practices [that] animates state power to produce and maintain both territorial and infrastructural capacities across multiple registers” and naming scholars like Marisol de la Cadena and Sylvia Wynter as sources of inspiration (90). She creates agency for the topic by showing its relevance to current events. Miller argues “Preemptive logic follows a line of reasoning whereby future catastrophe, imagined as imminent threat, is avoided through exercises of state violence in the present,” allowing “algorithmically driven futures” to “provide a speculative basis of innovation and scientific testing through which myriad forms of technologized killing and harm can be justified” (91, 94). Military discourses of war coalesce with police discourses alongside a flow of military-grade equipment and foreign imperial-colonial tactics, such that US police forces become the shadow of armed forces deployed across the globe.

The many abstract concepts Miller develops are traced back to Atlanta. There, she finds “military intelligence-gathering practices that are imagined as being used only in distant locations abroad provide the technological infrastructure for racialized policing practices” (96). Technology that tells officers the most dangerous 500-by-500 square feet blocks of the city at any given time of the week is fueled by past crime data and creates the “weaponization of space” to which her title gestures. She frames the piece with her experience of a lasershow at Stone Mountain that lacked any explicit presence of its titular drones, concluding “The lasershow seems to instruct its viewer to simultaneously understand the drone as an insensible object in the present while imagining the work of the drone as a floating signifier that can encapsulate a variety of past and future practices of war-making” (99). This meditation leads her to ask readers to consider “thinking with rather than against the insensible” so they can fundamentally shift the results of their inquiries (101).

Connection to other readings
Here are some thoughts about how this chapter connects to other readings from our class (or even outside of it!)

Connection to other chapters
"This is not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism" by R. Joshua Scannell could pair with this reading to some extent since they are both talking about predictive policing.