8,203 research outputs found
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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
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Open-street CCTV in Australia: the politics of resistance and expansion
This paper summarizes the first systematic attempt to document and assess the extent of open-street CCTV systems in Australia. In addition to providing empirical data, this paper argues that it is tempting for Australian scholars, and those elsewhere, to view the UK ‘surveillance revolution’ as the harbinger of inevitable global trends sweeping across jurisdictions. However analysis of the Australian data suggests that the deployment of CCTV in other national contexts may follow substantially divergent patterns. While the Australian CCTV experience follows many trends exhibited in other nations, it is nevertheless significant that the diffusion of CCTV in Australia has been more restrained than in the UK. We suggest that the divergence between the UK and Australian experiences resides in contrasting political structures and the consequent variation in the strength of debate and resistance at the local level
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Platform policing and the real-time cop
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
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Constructing the real-time border: Frontex, risk and dark imagination
The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, commonly known as Frontex, acquired augmented competencies in 2016. Additional operational capacity continues the expansionary trajectory the Agency has travelled since its inception. This paper provides an examination of the security rationalities underpinning and informing Frontex. Frontex is promoted as being ‘intelligence-led’. This claim is reinforced through the pivotal role of Frontex as a producer and distributor of risk analysis for European border control assemblages. The engagement of ‘imagination-based’ techniques in Frontex risk analysis attempts to foresee crises, which in turn mobilises rationalities of precaution, pre-emption and preparedness. The discussion then interrogates the security logics evident in the EUROSUR project, and its aspiration to provide border visualisations in ‘near-real-time’. It is argued that while the EUROSUR project may not represent ‘militarisation’ as such, it is riven with martial rationalities
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Marginalizing migrants: illegality, racialization, and vulnerability
This chapter examines how migrant deviance is constructed at the global and local level through processes of control manifested through law and policing. It then talks about the constitutive role of national and local border control agents in processes of exclusion and criminalization. The chapter considers the individual experiences of such control, and how such intensified controls both fabricate and escalate deviance. It further considers the intensified incarceration and deportation of irregular migrants, and how the stigma and criminalization of the deportation experience lingers upon individual identities following their forced return to the global South. The immigration detention complex operates parallel to a wider racialization of imprisonment, fuelled by the gravitation of policing activity towards those whose immigration status may be disputed, and where minor legal violations can result in incarceration and deportation
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Military surveillance
Military surveillance offers a crucial entry point into the study of surveillance. Historically, the importance of military organizations in state formation meant that many techniques of surveillance that would later migrate into the civilian sphere would bear the imprint of military origins. Moreover, military campaigns were instrumental in developing forms of discipline, communication and surveillance that were to have far-reaching implications for whole societies. Thus, both technologically and organizationally, military models and innovations informed new forms of social, commercial and industrial organization that mobilized principles of surveillance, coordination and control. More recently, scholars have argued that since the post Cold War era societies of the Global North have entered a state of perpetual war preparedness. Moreover, the post-war consolidation of a military-industrial complex in the US has stimulated a multitude of technological innovations with surveillance application. In recent times, technological advancement propelled by military surveillance fantasies have envisaged digitized battle and ‘virtuous war’ where casualties are eliminated and hostile forces rapidly subdued through superior command of information and high-tech weaponry. The blending and blurring of such fantasies through entertainment and media networks and into domestic policing domains has raised considerable concern about the dehumanizing consequences of remote killing, and the social implications of the militarization of everyday life
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Why has it only become an issue now? Young drug users' perceptions of drug driving in Melbourne, Victoria
Preliminary research into drug-user perceptions of drug driving was undertaken with a sample group of drug users aged 18 to 24 from Melbourne, Victoria. Eleven males and nine females participated in semi-structured interviews and completed self-report surveys. Participants discussed their drug driving and their perceptions of the likelihood of detection by police for drug driving. This research provides further insight into young people’s perceptions and behaviours in relation to drug use and driving. The perspectives of young people are rarely included in current drug-driving debates and may have possible implications for policy development
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