On Algorithmic Policing, Policy, and Radical Thought: Repoliticizing the “Environment” Against an Analytic of Scale

In recent years, the racially biased outcomes of policing algorithms used in U.S. cities have been met with critiques that levy contextual information about structural inequities as the necessary corrective. This article argues that this framework of critique circumscribes debates on racialized policing into adjudicating which scale of analysis adequately captures why data show up the way they do, stopping short of engagement with the key questions of political order that subtend movements against racialized policing. I aim to reactivate political contestations that have been eclipsed by data-driven policing through parsing three historically entangled understandings of political order, change, and racialized environments. Drawing on archival research into criminal justice institutions that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s, I show that policy contentions around scale of intervention led to the idea that crime data could be a key source of information about socioeconomic environments. The "environment" offered by integrationist thinkers challenged this by shifting blame for racial inequities into the macrostructural but, ultimately, recapitulated patriarchal notions of political participation. Turning to literatures from Black radical and Black feminist organizing of the same era, I argue that their understanding of racialized environments as shaped by global forces redefined the political function of the family in ways ranging from transnational racial belonging to the collectivization of responses to gender-based violence. My argument moves the conversation on algorithmic policing from the logistical toward considering historic and contemporary visions of liberatory political order able to organize life without police.