Platform policing and the real-time cop

Abstract

Policing, particularly in the United States, is being progressively datafied. This process has a historical trajectory that is crucial to the analysis and critique of new platform-based security architectures. Predictive policing has already attracted considerable attention, partially due to its seemingly novel fusion of predictive analytics and police work. Hyperbolic early claims—often mobilizing science fiction imagery—that the future could, in fact, be predicted, pointed towards utopic/dystopic imaginaries of seamlessly integrated control. Predictive policing is, however, increasingly only one component of cloud-based data systems that are coursing through police activity. The imaginary of these transformations can be analysed through the security imaginary of policing as a process of real-time data transmission, perpetually self-adjusting and self-augmenting through machine calculation. The historical contextualization of this imaginary suggests useful vectors of inquiry that position platform policing squarely within the mechanisms of contemporary capitalism.