Algorithmic chains of translation: predictive policing and the need for team-based ethnography

For several years crime prediction software has been increasingly used by police departments throughout the world with the aim of establishing predictive policing, in the hopes of being able to predict possible future offenses, in order to prevent them. Predictive policing is a topical example of how security authorities ‘defuturize’ the future by generating future-related knowledge via sociotechnical means. However, these technologies do not merely generate anticipative insights about the future, but also shape it through their interventions in the present. Grounded on ethnographic insights on the implementation of predictive policing in Germany and Switzerland, this chapter addresses predictive policing as a sociotechnical process of producing and shaping crime-related futures.