Final Project / Profiling as proto-predictive policing (Tania)

 

 

(Pages 12 and 16 of the December 1986 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin)

It’s 1958, and a LAPD cop tires of the slog of research via the old media of teletype and library reading rooms; so he dreams up a national archive of criminal information that might be used, among other things, to track down the kind of criminal—a serial killer—he suspects he’s currently investigating. Fast forward to 1984, and a Reagan-era moral panic about increased crime provides the perfect constellation of forces for the FBI to set just such a plan in motion. It’s called VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and it takes the initial form of a computer program designed to detect patterns in large amounts of data—this data being input via a 15-page VICAP Crime Report designed by the FBI and hawked to local law enforcement. Three things emerge from this experiment: the design of a kind of bureaucratic apparatus (i.e. the specific division created within the FBI to administer VICAP and related programs: the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC) that could interface between the scales of nation, state, and city; criminal data aggregation; and the development, via this data and through the figure of the serial killer, of the ‘science’ of criminal profiling as a highly specific expression of forensic psychology.

My project hopes to put this history in conversation with a contemporary offshoot of these early experiments in bureaucracy, data collection, and algorithmic pattern generation as techniques of law enforcement—a formation we now call predictive policing. Specific examples I’d look at (might) include PredPol, LASER, and the ‘new’ invention of fusion centers. Wendy Chun’s work on correlation and the repressed history of statistics informs this project, as do Mark Andrejevic’s ideas on ‘post-disciplinary’ forms of surveillance/control, and also (in contrast to Andrejevic) Foucauldian formulations of the continuity rather than distinction between individual and population, discipline and security.

The FBI Bulletins are also just incredibly fun literary and visual objects. Artwork in the style of pulp fiction, criminality as always at least partly a fictional/aesthetic project…