Hi friends! This week, I’m in Protean Magazine with an essay on CompStat, the police management program and software. A short excerpt:
“CompStat, with its aestheticized infographics and quantification of urban social metrics, has shaped police forces over the past thirty years in a significant way. As an abstracted representation mediating between the police and the people, it relies on a deep reductionism, quantifying crime and communities as numerical problems to be solved. With CompStat, the usual promise of the emancipatory power of data is turned on its head: supposedly intended to make our lives safer, its crime data is instead weaponized as a tool of the police, used to justify policing’s very existence through statistics and efficiency measures.”
Hope you have a wonderful weekend!
- Ben