Critical Perspectives on Predictive Policing: Anticipating Proof?

This chapter interrogates the question of what defines predictive policing. Our point of departure is notions in Science and Technology Studies that attend to how boundary objects such as predictive policing are produced through the interrelation of politics, sociotechnical imaginaries, and contestations. Through ethnographic inquiry on the empirical case of the POL-INTEL platform of the Danish police, we follow the evolution and demarcations in the (re)-classifications of POL-INTEL from predictive to non-predictive. In so doing, we situate POL-INTEL in the wider international context regarding the development of predictive policing and investigate the boundary work between predictive policing and similar concepts such as Intelligence-Led Policing. Concisely, we argue that the development of the notion of predictive policing is fundamentally unstable and tied to political and economic interests.