Machine-Led Policing: Big Data and the Age of Robotic Social Control

Evolving out of the now dominant model of intelligence-led policing, the premises of ‘predpol’ and other iterations of the probabilistic police resource allocation trend remains highly conventional: that police can control crime and, conversely, that crime results from insufficient policing. This paper will show that not only machine-led policing is inevitably disconnected from the intersubjective reality of the neighbourhoods it purports to protect, but as a system it can only grow towards increasing alienation.