Predictive policing management: a brief history of patrol automation

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified and integrated into the circuits of contemporary digital capitalism

Rhode Island Report on the Judiciary 1980-1982

This ninth report on the judiciary has been produced by the Administrative Office of State Courts. During the period covered in the report the courts have made progress in several areas. Among these, major improvements to court facilities, the achievement of speedy trial goals, and the work of several study committees stand out as examples of what has been achieved

Broken Records: How America's Faulty Background Check System Allows Criminal to Get Guns

The report, entitled Broken Records, uses data culled from the Department of Justice and various state sources and gives failing grades to 22 states for having grossly inadequate criminal, domestic violence, and mental disability records. North Carolina received the top grade of B+, followed by New York and Michigan, which received B's. Indiana maintains the worst records in the country.Each state compiles felony conviction, mental disability, and domestic violence records for use by the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) and state agencies to approve or disapprove gun buyers under the Brady Law. Because states have failed to computerize many of these records, thousands of prohibited buyers have been able to obtain guns even after undergoing a background check.AGSF found that, according to state and federal sources, 9,976 prohibited buyers throughout the nation obtained a gun because of faulty records. Under federal law, if the state or federal government cannot complete a background check within 3 business days, gun dealers may turn over a firearm to a buyer. AGSF warned that this number represents only the tip of the iceberg, as the figure does not include the thousands of others who might have obtained guns illegally because mental disability and domestic violence records are either not part of the database or totally nonexistent in many states

Sentencing as craftwork and the binary epistemologies of the discretionary decision process

This article contends that it is time to take a critical look at a series of binary categories which have dominated the scholarly and reform epistemologies of the sentencing decision process. These binaries are: rules versus discretion; reason versus emotion; offence versus offender; normative principles versus incoherence; aggravating versus mitigating factors; and aggregate/tariff consistency versus individualized sentencing. These binaries underpin both the 'legal-rational' tradition (by which I mean a view of discretion as inherently suspect, a preference for the use of philosophy of punishment justifications and an explanation of the decision process through factors or variables), and also the more recent rise of the 'new penology'. Both approaches tend to rely on 'top-down' assumptions of change, which pay limited attention to the agency of penal workers. The article seeks to develop a conception of sentencing craftwork as a social and interpretive process.1 In so doing, it applies and develops a number of Kritzer's observations (in this issue) about craftwork to sentencing. These craftwork observations are: problem solving (applied to the rules - discretion and reason - emotion dichotomies); skills and techniques (normative penal principles and the use of cognitive analytical assumptions); consistency (tariff versus individualized sentencing); clientele (applied to account giving and the reality of decision making versus expression). By conceiving of sentencing as craftwork, the binary epistemologies of the sentencing decision process, which have dominated (and limited) the scholarly and policy sentencing imaginations, are revealed as dynamic, contingent, and synergistic. However, this is not to say that such binaries are no more than empty rhetoric concealing the reality of the decision process. Rather, these binaries serve as crucial legitimating reference points in the vocabulary of sentencing account giving