Ambivalent Morality: Negotiating the (Neo)Colonial Conditions of Policing at the Urban Margins

ABSTRACT Scholars have demonstrated how (neo)colonialism has produced durable North‐South hierarchies in knowledge production about crime and punishment. Yet, most of these studies emphasize the epistemic “weight of empire” in ways that obscure the relational dynamics under which local bureaucrats domesticate imperial policy experiments at the margins of postcolonial cities. By taking the case of the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD) in Santiago, Chile, this article explores how and why police officers and data analysts respond to “colonial situations” behind predictive policing as they navigate its underlying “broken windows” philosophy demanded by bank lenders and reinforced by US advisors. Drawing upon ethnographic observations within a Comisaria in Santiago, I argue that police officers and professionals negotiate the (neo)colonial conditions of policing through ambivalent morality —a set of hybrid discourses concerning individual choices that allows officers to inflict the criminal stigma upon the poor and assign responsibility for crime. Officers and data analysts interpret US “broken windows” philosophy through fragmented scripts and counterscripts that both reinforce and decenter poverty and personal choices as the primary sources of crime. Drawing upon these narratives, these agents define who is a criminal, what crimes deserve to be suppressed, and under what conditions somebody could legitimately break the law. This study not only shows how police officers and professionals redefine policing in moral terms but also illustrates the simultaneous attraction to and denial of neocolonial power while disclosing the symbolic mechanisms (i.e., scripts and counterscripts) under which this hybridity disrupts a simplistic replication of US “broken windows” discourse at the margins of Santiago.