This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism

Chapter author: R. Joshua Scannell

Page author: Nataly Dickson

Summary
In his chapter, R. Joshua Scannell works to dispel assumptions about crime and policing. The first assumption he dispels suggests that what is considered a “crime” is not defined outside of a relation from the police. Instead, it is policing that produces crime (108). The second assumption is that “policing can, has, or will exist separate from that active production of racial difference.” Rather, policing makes race and cannot be separated from it (108). The third, and final assumption, is that policing has limits. It is in this assumption where Scannell introduces technology, specifically amongst criminal justice agencies and their use of digital computers and data mining technologies, where policing traverses through predictive policing.

Scannell addresses these assumptions further by pairing it alongside Minority Report, both the 1956 original story by Philip K. Dick and the 2002 movie by Steven Spielberg. Although there are differences between the book and the film, he argues that, “both Minority Reports are stories about American racial capitalism’s intrinsic entanglement with eugenics, carcerality, and enslavement” (108). In between discussions of Minority Report(s), he divides up his conversation into two sections, “The Fix is In” and “Fixed in Place”.

In “The Fix Is In”, Scannell discusses a contemporary predictive policing software named HunchLab and examines how it is developed and deployed. Predictive policing gained popularity during America’s Great Recession as a means to cut costs and would allow officers to “do more with less” (113-114). HunchLab was pitched with this idea, as well as the idea that by using this system, it would allow police to focus on underserved or “fragile” communities and would “fix” public safety (114). This predictive policing system was ultimately sold on what Scannell describes as the “community euphemism” which would facilitate, “the transformation of race into metrics that open up policing to liberal logics of care, accountability, and objectivity” (115).

“Fixed in Place” begins with a quote from Spielberg’s Minority Report where an agent questions why the precogs, those who can see murders in the future, are unable to see rapes, assaults, or suicides (118). To this, agent Fletcher responds that it is due to the untimeliness of these murders. Scannell focuses on the notion of “untimeliness” and places this notion against Dick’s Minority Report, where the precogs in the story see various forms of crimes but the officers decide which arrests to make (120). Ultimately what Scannell argues is that predictive policing is not about preventing crime nor keeping people and communities safe, but it is about racism and attributing or targeting the potentiality of crimes to be committed in marginalized communities by marginalized people. This untimeliness or justification on what arrests officers decide to make is based around risk. Scannell states that, “predictive policing does not produce real” but instead it produces “instabilities” which organize racial state violence (121, 123). The “uncontrollability” of crime is what predictive policing makes and where predictive policing thrives.

Connection to other readings
Although I have not read Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, her TedTalk titled, "How biased are our algorithms?" which is based around her text, points to a similar conversation about how algorithms are reflective of our racist society.

Ruha Benjamin's text, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Connection to other chapters
Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy: I think there are a lot of crossovers between predictive policing and the surveillance discussed in this chapter.