Predictive Policing:

This essay examines how the complex relations between preemption, stasis, and the future’s uncertainty structure 21^st-century predictive policing systems, which I define as technologies of stasis. I argue that in predictive policing, stasis (defined here as the reproduction of dominant power relations and technopolitical arrangements) masquerades as prediction and inevitable future. Focusing on the predictive policing technology PredPol, I explain how PredPol naturalizes racialized and gendered conceptions of criminality and discriminatory policing as inevitable phenomena. I bring my analysis of PredPol into conversation with Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” (1956) and the artworks 2015 (2019), by American Artist, and White Collar Crime Risk Zones (2017), by Sam Lavigne, Francis Tseng, and Brian Clifton, all of which foreground PredPol’s reproduction of discriminatory stasis while also offering aesthetic speculations that challenge and destabilize the PredPol’s production of preemptive and static futures. Methodologically, I privilege artistic theorizations of predictive policing to frame my analysis of PredPol. In foregrounding how artistic works trouble PredPol’s organizing logics, I unfold my discussion of PredPol through the lens of stasis’ destabilization rather than its supposed inevitability.