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

Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference

The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime

Masculinity as Governance: police, public service and the embodiment of authority, c. 1700-1850

About the book: Public Men offers an introduction to an exciting new field: the history of masculinities in the political domain and will be essential reading for students and specialists alike with interests in gender or political culture. By building upon new work on gender and political culture, these new case studies explore the gendering of the political domain and the masculinities of the men who have historically dominated it. As such, Public Men is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of Britain between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth centuries

Over ‘sexed’ regulation and the disregarded worker: an overview of the impact of sexual entertainment policy on lap-dancing club workers

In England and Wales, with the introduction of Section 27 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009, lap-dancing clubs can now be licensed as Sexual Entertainment Venues. This article considers such, offering a critique of Section 27, arguing that this legislation is not evidence-based, with lap-dancing policy, like other sex-work policies, often associated with crime, deviance and immorality. Furthermore, it is argued that sex-work policies are gradually being homogenised as well as increasingly criminalised. Other criticisms relate to various licensing loopholes which lead to some striptease venues remaining unlicensed and unregulated, potentially impacting on the welfare of erotic dancers. In addition, restrictions on the numbers of lap-dancing venues may exacerbate dancer unemployment, drawing these women into poverty. Finally, The Policing and Crime Act reflects how the political focus is being directed away from the exploitation of workers, on to issues relating to crime and deviance, despite limited evidence to support this focus

The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties

This report describes the relationship between drug admission rates and the structural and demographic characteristics of counties -- budgets and spending for law enforcement, unemployment rates, poverty rates, and the percentage of the population that is African American

Community Self Help

This paper advocates controlling crime through a greater emphasis on precautions taken not by individuals, but by communities. The dominant battles in the literature today posit two central competing models of crime control. In one, the standard policing model, the government is responsible for the variety of acts that are necessary to deter and prosecute criminal acts. In the other, private self-help, public law enforcement is largely supplanted by providing incentives to individuals to self-protect against crime. There are any number of nuances and complications in each of these competing stories, but the literature buys into this binary matrix