Original Research Article

Big Data & Society

January–June 2019: 1–13
To predict and to manage. Predictive ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/2053951719861703
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Bilel Benbouzid

Abstract
This article offers a detailed examination of the content of predictive policing applications. Crime prediction machines
are used by governments to shape the moral behavior of police. They serve not only to predict when and where crime is
likely to occur, but also to regulate police work. They calculate equivalence ratios, distributing security across the
territory based on multiple cost and social justice criteria. Tracing the origins of predictive policing in the Compstat
system, this article studies the shift from machines to explore intuitions (where police officers still have control over the
machine) to applications removing the reflexive dimension of proactivity, thus turning prediction into the medium for
‘‘dosage’’ metrics of police work quantities. Finally, the article discusses how, driven by a critical movement denouncing
the discriminatory biases of predictive machines, developers seek to develop techniques to audit training dataset and
ways to calculate the reasonable amount of stop and frisk over the population.

Keywords
Predictive policing, Compstat, algorithm, big data

movement in the United States aimed at making the

Introduction
How should we make sense of the promise to ‘‘predict
where and when crimes are likely to happen’’?1 How do
the private companies that sell software as a service
(SaaS) to police departments, in the form of predictive
maps and analytical dashboards, envision public action
on safety? What do the developers of crime prediction
machines dream of (Cardon, 2015)? In this article I pro-
pose to answer these questions by examining the content
of the software used in ‘‘predictive policing,’’ a topic that
bounces back systematically in the overall public debate
on big data and machine learning (Mayer-Schonberger
and Cukier, 2013; O’Neil, 2016).
Crime prediction machines are used by governments
to shape the moral behavior of police. That is, they
calculate equivalence relations (Desrosières, 2002), dis-
tributing safety over the territory according to multiple
criteria of cost and social justice. They serve not only to
predict where and when crimes may occur, but also,
and in fact mainly, to direct, supervise, and regulate
police work.
To understand the development of predictive poli-
cing, it must be situated within the policing reform
police more proactive and vigilant, rather than reactive
and emergency-focused. Emerging along this line,
Compstat was designed and deployed in New York in
the 1990s by the chief of police William Bratton
(Bratton and Knobler, 2009). According to this doc-
trine, which is directly inspired by New Public
Management, to make policing proactive, change was
needed in the organization of police work. The idea was
to ensure the accountability of all levels of the police
organization, and in particular the levels closest to
safety problems, at the level of the precinct heads,
who would be required to systematically account for
the results of the work of each officer in their territory.
In practice, the method is based on weekly ‘‘Compstat
meetings’’—more explicitly, ‘‘crime control strategy
meetings’’—supported by a computerized data
Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, France
Corresponding author:
Bilel Benbouzid, Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, Marne la Vallee
77454, France.
Email: bilel.benbouzid@u-pem.fr

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2 Big Data & Society
recording system, the Compstat System (short for
Computerized Statistics). At these meetings, the strate-
gies implemented at the precinct level are evaluated
in light of the associated trends in crime
(Silverman, 1999).
The emergence of the category of predictive policing
can be interpreted as a process whereby the two over-
arching principles of Compstat are progressively imple-
mented as algorithms, or automated. The first is the
orientation of action based on knowledge in order to
better identify problems; the second is the management
of police organization through mechanisms of measure-
ment, monitoring, and control of officers’ activity. The
objective of the developers of police machines is to link
together these two dimensions in the form of metrics
for predicting both crime and organizational efficiency.
In other words, predictive policing uses the trappings of
technological innovation and big data (cloud data stor-
age and a dashboard interface) to dress up what is
essentially a management tool.
Here I focus on the management dimension of pre-
dictive policing, examining in detail the production of
these different algorithmically calculated metrics that
allow a quantitative measurement of the production
of safety by the police. We will see that predictive poli-
cing extends Compstat’s project of rationalizing the
administration of policing by implementing metrics
aimed at quantitatively measuring out ‘‘doses’’ of
police work. These metrics aim not only at increasing
the productivity of the police, but also at reinforcing
the sense of political legitimacy that it needs in the
population. By exploring the diversity of types of met-
rics, their ways of defining priorities and optimizing
police presence in space and time, I will show how pre-
dictive machines seek to transform police action (part
2). I will also explore how, in response to a movement
criticizing the discriminatory biases of predictive
machines, developers conceived techniques for auditing
the learning databases and the calculations of reason-
able amounts of police stop and frisk in the population
(part 3). But before entering into the details of these
metrics, we must retrace the origins of these analytical
platforms in the Compstat system (part 1). This will
help us understand how geographical information sys-
tems (GISs) were first conceived as web sites aimed at
giving officers easy and quick access to statistical infor-
mation and allowing them to test the intuitions on stra-
tegies that arose at Compstat meetings. Only in a later
phase did predictive machines emerge, not to serve offi-
cers as part of the Compstat procedure, but to trans-
form Compstat itself into an algorithm.
This article focuses on two predictive platforms,
Hunchlab and PredPol, but there are many others.
Over the last five years, I have followed the evolution
of these systems, accumulating all available documents,
interviewing key actors,2 consulting software, and
taking part in both private discussions and public
debates with the developers themselves as a sociologist
of science and technology. Here I present the results of
a comprehensive study of what predictive machines are,
or at least what they seek to become.
The origins of predictive policing
Before analytical platforms came to market, crime
maps were created in police departments using GISs
installed on the personal computers of crime analysts
(Chainey and Ratcliffe, 2013). In the 1990s, the spread-
sheets, spatial analysis, and statistical software pack-
ages that make up GISs presented this emerging
profession with the occasion to discover tools that
opened up new perspectives for the analysis of crime
(Weisburd and Lum, 2005). However, they did not
prove to be well suited to the informational needs of
police administration: the demand for the management
of a growing quantity of data collected with the devel-
opment of microcomputing and for statistical and car-
tographical information connected to new managerial
practices. In this context, automating the production of
analytical information and making it quickly and easily
accessible to police officers appears as a solution.
An online cartographic information system for
Compstat
The emergence of crime mapping platforms in the late
1990s was not simply the fruit of chance developments
in local police forces. In Philadelphia, one actor in
particular worked toward the development of the first
‘‘web mapping’’ applications in this domain: Robert
Cheetham, the developer of the GIS of the
Philadelphia police, the Philadelphia Crime and
Mapping Systems (PHiCAMS) and the Crime Spike
Detector (the prototype of Hunchlab) between 1997
and 2006, first within the police administration, and
then as an entrepreneur in the startup he created in
2000. When Cheetham was recruited by the
Philadelphia police to set up a crime analysis and map-
ping unit, he continued at the same time to work as a
software developer within the Cartographic Modeling
Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Cheetham
approached GIS simultaneously in both computing
and analytical terms.
This approach was a good fit with Compstat, with its
need for a computerized system to collect and process
spatial and temporal data. Compstat was implemented
in Philadelphia following the arrival of a new chief of
police in 1998, John Timoney, whose program was
inspired by his experiences in New York under
William Bratton. In this context, the crime analysis
Benbouzid
and mapping unit became the central instrument of the
reform of the Philadelphia police to support the
Compstat process. This ‘‘Compstat process’’ consisted
in weekly three-hour meetings where each commanding
officer would present the situation in his precinct, the
actions undertaken there, and crime trends within his
geographical area. The aim of these meetings was to
enable discussion on the allocation of resources based
on an analysis of problems and the presentation of
strategies to resolve them. Crime maps were the core
tools in this negotiation.
But with only three analysts, the crime mapping and
analysis unit did not have enough staff to meet the stat-
istical needs of an organization of more than 6000
police officers. The arrival of Compstat meant the
weekly production of a series of quantitative measures
and cartographic representations of crime for each of
the 39 districts. The desktop tools used by crime ana-
lysts did not meet the double challenge that faced the
unit with the arrival of Compstat: first, to collect, store,
and rapidly update flows of data, and second, to meet
the analytical needs of police officers.
When Cheetham joined the unit, located within the
Information Systems Division at the Philadelphia
Police Department, officers had access to multiple data-
bases, but most could only be accessed from machines
physically located in police headquarters. At the time
there was no system linking the data together. In
demanding the implementation of data-based strate-
gies, Compstat created a requirement for all officers
to have access to information systems, anywhere and
anytime, in order to combine data from different
sources and project them onto maps. However, with
its thousands of officers, the police did not have the
means to pay for a license for GIS software on each
personal machine within the force. And even if it had
managed to find funding for these licenses, the problem
would not have been solved. Maintenance costs for
software installed across multiple workstations in geo-
graphically distributed locations were very high, and it
was difficult to maintain up-to-date spatial and criminal
incident data on workstations.
The solution chosen to this problem was to develop
an online platform for the organization and technical
management of the data, which would also allow police
officers operating from multiple sites, far from head-
quarters, to access and manipulate it through GIS soft-
ware. Beginning in the 1980s, database management
systems were sufficiently optimized to enable their exe-
cution on low-cost hardware. Cheetham drew on this
technical advancement to develop a web-based GIS,
PHiCAMS, allowing officers to visualize all incidents
to which the police had reacted, to search in multiple
databases, to create graphical representations, and to
easily produce reports. In the late 1990s, when
3
Cheetham implemented PHiCAMS, the Philadelphia
police was considered to be at the cutting edge among
police departments in terms of geographical informa-
tion technologies. The innovative character of
PHiCAMS can be understood by situating it in the
context of the 1990s, when the web was providing a
new ‘‘envelope’’ which implied major changes in
police officers’ relationship and access to cartographic
information on crime. The assessment of problems
within the district was now mediated by the web
interface.
Computer-assisted intuition
If Phicam appeared as a computational innovation, it
remained a descriptive tool. During Compstat meet-
ings, anticipation of the future was present as a reflexive
and strategic dimension constructed through police offi-
cers’ discussions around historical maps of criminal
activity. PHiCAMS thus kept police officers in a react-
ive stance: crime maps reflect past activity. But police
officers must develop their strategies on the basis of
predictive information. The challenge thus becomes to
automate reflexivity and proactivity within the map.
It is possible to train police officers in the subtleties
of using GIS, database manipulation, and the use of
statistical software packages in order to allow them to
make connections between variables and estimate the
future behavior of criminal phenomena, but this type of
training would be highly time-consuming, costly, and
would not necessarily fit with the role of the police offi-
cer. How, then, could a prescriptive GIS be created?
How could pattern detection be put to work upstream,
in order to offer autonomy to police officers, down-
stream? What type of prescription do police officers
need? What intelligence can a machine automatically
provide that is useful to police officers and at the
same time meets the demands of Compstat? To
answer this question, Cheetham understand that
police officers need to be able to interact with analytical
applications that would be limited to predefined uses
and that would be updated daily.
It was in this context that Cheetham conceived a
machine for detecting and signaling trends in criminal-
ity: the Crime Spike Detector, a machine based on the
model of the early warning system. In 2000, at the
national conference on crime mapping in San Diego,
the first prototype was presented as a program enabling
data on recorded incidents and service calls to be used
to detect areas of statistically unusual activity, or
‘‘crime spikes.’’ The version of the Spike Detector
that followed the prototype was developed beginning
in 2004 and then released in 2006 in the form of a
web application. The innovative aspect of the Spike
Detector lay less in the algorithm that calculated the
4 Big Data & Society
warnings than in the web technologies on which it was
based. The major transformations in police work that it
would bring came from the manipulation of its
dynamic pages, visualization through maps, and signal-
ing of alerts. The principle of the Spike Detector was as
follows: police officers could access the web site at any
time to perform analyses, but in most cases they
would do so because they had received a notification
from the Spike Detector by email. They also had access
to the specific incidents that contributed to a particular
peak via PHiCAMS, which provided details
on the individual crimes. By clicking the ‘‘Graphs’’
link, the user would access a histogram that would
make the spike statistically intelligible. In addition to
this ability to visualize the spikes on a graph, the
user could click on the ‘‘Map’’ link to display a map
of the city presenting other spikes in the form of
a square.
The version of Hunchlab that followed the Spike
Detector maintained the model of the early warning
system, but became more flexible. The Hunchlab devel-
opers sought a way to represent the intuitions of police
officers that would allow a computer to understand and
visualize them. In 2008, the first version of Hunchlab
put on the market worked on the principle of a search
based on five predefined criteria (incident categories, a
geographical area determined by the user on a map, the
definition of a historical period of comparison, the def-
inition of the period corresponding to the intuition (the
hunch), and the direction of the spike—up or down).
While this first version remained quite simple, the
research projects from this period that I consulted
sketch out the premises for a machine that would be
able to test more precise intuitions (time of day, day of
the week, modus operandi associated to the class of
incident, etc.).
From intuition to prediction
The Hunchlab machine whose development I have just
described was aimed at police officers, but also at crime
analysts. It automated the production of the informa-
tion on which discussion would be based. Contrary to
the predictive machines of the 2010s, it did not yet rec-
ommend patrolling trajectories.
To understand the movement from the first version
of Hunchlab to the emergence of predictive machines,
note that in the late 1990s in the United States, machine
learning techniques to predict the occurrence of crime
in space and time were being tested in laboratories
(Groff and Vigne, 2002). This academical research
took place at the same time as the creation of the
Crime Spike Detector, but the developers of the
Philadelphia platform deliberately avoided the notion
of prediction. The main aim was to develop a machine
in the form of a web site, in order to allow officers to
test their intuitions and navigate in the detected spikes.
Between 2000 and 2006, the Spike Detector
remained an experimental platform within the comput-
ing environment of the Philadelphia police. The first
version of Hunchlab, released in the late 2000s, was
designed for sale as a commercial product. In market
research performed in 2008, around 50 police depart-
ments were identified as potential clients for the first
version of Hunchlab, notably on the basis of their com-
puting resources. To use Hunchlab, the police had to
possess the computing equipment needed for the appli-
cation to work, that is they had to be equipped with
servers for its storage and execution, but also with the
entire development environment that was associated to
it. However, only two cities took up the experiment.
The cruel upshot was that the first version of
Hunchlab was a commercial failure, despite 10 years
of intensive research and development. In contrast,
when PredPol burst onto the scene in 2012, it found
immediate commercial success.
Faced with the commercial success of PredPol,
Hunchlab progressively relinquished its innovative con-
cept of ‘‘computer-assisted intuition.’’ According to
Cheetham, PredPol succeeded based on something
Hunchlab lacked: in his terms the productization of
the platform. PredPol’s innovation lay in its simplicity.
The platform provided simplified interactive maps
(a red square on a map) using a hotspot calculation
algorithm projected on a dashboard, which could be
displayed on a computer, tablet, or smartphone. In
2013, the company that brought Hunchlab to market
undertook a complete overhaul of the platform. A
second version was developed from scratch, becoming
SaaS and entirely revamping the tool’s uses to align it
with the model of the PredPol machine. The second
version of Hunchlab was thus entirely different from
the first. Like PredPol, it would project future crimes
on a map. The projections would require no interpret-
ation on the part of the police officers. The machine was
now aimed at directly orienting police patrols. From an
application constructed within the computing system of
the police, aimed at helping police officers to explore
hypotheses and intuitions, it became a much more
external application producing automatic predictions
and, thereby, eliminating the reflexive dimension of
proactivity.
Productivist policing
Before the commercialization of PredPol, the Hunchlab
platform was a component of a broader doctrine in
policing. The developers of Hunchlab sought to instill
the machine with a certain flexibility. Police officers
would test their intuitions at the commands of the
Benbouzid
machine. In introducing the vocabulary of prediction,
PredPol changed the nature of the interaction
between the police officer and the machine, that is the
human–machine hierarchy is reversed: the machine is
situated at the center of police action and not at its
periphery.
Predictive policing was progressively placed at the
same level as Compstat (Police Executive Research
Forum, 2013). But when predictive policing ceases to
be merely a software solution, and becomes a more
general approach to policing, prediction no longer
serves to predict crime—in the multiple senses that sci-
entists give to this expression (Hofman et al., 2017).
Contrary to what common sense might suggest, predic-
tion in itself is not the objective of these machines.
Prediction quickly became a standard element, which
was fairly simple to implement:
I do think that the idea of creating crime predictions –
is beginning to be somewhat commoditized. By this I
mean the idea of just the predictions themselves.
Building a system that just makes predictions is not
all that difficult and so it is ripe for commoditization.
(Interview with Jeremy Heffner, developer and product
manager of Hunchlab, August 2016)
Thus, the development of these platforms depends on
elements connected to but separate from prediction,
that is modules and specifications enabling the predic-
tions to be integrated into tools that provide oper-
ational recommendations. These tools offered
managers knowledge on the state of use of the resources
that they were charged with allocating. From this per-
spective, for developers, predictive policing amounts to
a translation of Compstat management principles into
algorithms. The prediction thus becomes the vector of a
whole set of metrics aimed at making the police
proactive.
Stop and frisk quotas dosed out in real time
The initial objective of Compstat was to manage pro-
active policing. But how can proactivity be made into a
quantity? How can an equivalence be established
between this quantity and safety? Since the reforms of
public administrations in the 1990s, police district com-
manders have been charged with the management of an
amount of proactivity, to be quantified in terms of
decreases in expected criminality. But how can the man-
ager of a police district ensure the proactivity of each
officer in the field, and thereby of the productivity of
their work? How can district commanders ensure that
tasks of producing safety have been successfully per-
formed? In the field, far from the eyes of supervisors,
police officers have a great deal of freedom.
5
One way to constrain them is to subject them to
quotas of proactivity (Bronstein, 2014; Eterno and
Silverman, 2012; Spitzer, 1999). In New York, a
‘‘stop and frisk’’ system was implemented, requiring a
minimum quantity of identity stop and frisk and,
potentially, body searches per officer. This was high-
lighted by Wesley Skogan (2017), a well-known obser-
ver of police practices in the United States, who views
these quotas as an organizational strategy:
Stop and frisk as an agency strategy takes on many
additional features. In this instance, stops are not just
reactions to events; officers set out on patrol intending
to conduct them. That is their mission, or part of it. It is
their mission because their managers expect them to
conduct stops and ‘‘lay hands on people’’ (a Chicago
phrase for conducting a search). Officers are encour-
aged to ‘‘make their numbers’’ in order to keep their
bosses happy. Their stops are entered into the agency’s
data system, so they are indeed numbers. Their man-
agers monitor the numbers. They may impose a formal
quota, setting a target number of stops for each shift, or
they may just call for ‘‘more numbers’’ during roll call
meetings. Managers insist on numbers because they, in
turn, are being held to account by executives at police
headquarters. In organizations that adopt stop and
frisk as a strategy, the numbers generated by various
units will be utilized at CompStat management sessions
to berate or belittle unit commanders who do not
‘‘make their numbers.’’ In turn, top executives will
describe what they are doing as ‘‘vital to crime preven-
tion’’ when they address their political leaders, the
media and the public. They will interpret their numbers
as evidence that they are doing a great deal to combat
crime, and warn that any move to question their num-
bers will put the public at great risk.
Quotas indicate minimum quantities of routine stops
allocated to patrolling officers and are thus simple to
implement. They represent a way of making a police
officer proactive. Used in high doses, stops become a
technique for maintaining order. Saturating areas con-
sidered to be hotspots with police stop and frisk can
disperse gang members, increase the probability of
arrest for the possession of drugs or firearms, and
find greater numbers of undocumented migrants.
Quotas are convenient metrics for the value of the
work of officers on patrol, because they allow measure-
ment of their productivity at work in what, in principle,
are low-visibility situations.
But quotas have been heavily criticized by networks
of civil rights activists and by police officers themselves
(Ismaili, 2015). The use of stop and frisk in high doses
was judged unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge
in the case of Floyd v. City of New York (Bellin, 2014;
6 Big Data & Society
White and Fradella, 2016). This was followed by a huge
decrease in stop and frisk (97% between 2011 and
2016). This deprived the police not only of the sole
strategy on which its proactivity was based, but also
of its principal management tool.
The PredPol company innovated by offering a plat-
form that integrated the same function as quotas:
allowing managers to ensure that officers, during the
time of their patrols, carry out the work expected
according to production objectives established by
their superiors. To do so, they conceived the platform
not as a GIS, but as a ‘‘dashboard’’ to be used to moni-
tor this production in real time, through the quantity of
work performed by police officers in the field. To put
the police officers under real-time pressure, a stream
computing platform was needed that could process
data flows ‘‘on the fly’’ in order to record the trajec-
tories of patrols. To do this, PredPol integrated the
data from the GPS monitoring systems placed in
police cars, so that officers could be tracked and the
time that the patrols spent in different areas of the
city could be monitored. To organize the distribution
of patrols in space and time, the PredPol developers
proposed a smart use of the results of their research:
they discovered that the police patrols attained a suffi-
cient level of efficiency by spending only 5% of their
time in the areas identified by the algorithm. These
results were precious, because they made it possible to
precisely control the dosage of patrols, while making
the most economical possible use of the proactive por-
tion of police activity. One of PredPol’s early users was
Sean Malinowski, who at the time was police captain in
the Foothill Area in Los Angeles as well as project head
of the predictive policing program funded by the
Bureau of Justice Assistance. He explained to me how
this quantified dosage helped to improve the manage-
ment of proactivity:
I think this is what’s difficult for leaders in our job to
understand, once you start saying, well you shall spend
time in this box, and if you don’t something’s going to
happen to you, then they start self-over-reporting, I
think. So what we started doing then is have them hit
the button in the computer in the car to start their time
in a box, and we were tracking them that way, cause we
didn’t have Automatic Vehicle Locators (AVL), so
right now AVL in all of the patrol vehicles, and we
are dealing with bringing all of that data in and have
been testing setting up electronic fences with PredPol
missions, and we’re going to have real dosage. We did
an experiment in Foothill where [. . .] we were able to
track how much time they were spending. [. . .] What we
think was happening is [. . .] the GPS was picking up the
times when they weren’t even aware they were in a box,
so if they stopped on their way to a radio call, and they
stopped at a traffic light that happens to be in a pre-
dictive box, that is still a deterrent. It might have been,
because if a suspect sees them there, he doesn’t know
what they’re doing there, so we were tracking all of that
[...]. George took it to Topanga and had like 200 hours
or something a week, and we looked at, what’s optimal,
and we were able to break it down to somewhere
between 70 and 100, I mean, the more dosage the
better, but it’s diminishing returns over time, in terms
of the effect on crime. So you’re going to have this
dosage meter. (Sean Malinowski, The International
Association of Chiefs of Police conference, 2015,
allocution)
The dosimeter presented by Malinowski works on the
simple principle of the differentiated color of the boxes:
The predictive square remains red on the map as long
as the police have not patrolled there, turns yellow with
the first periods in the box, and then becomes green
when the police officer has spent the optimal time
there as calculated based on the available resources
(e.g., 5% of the daily working time of a patrol).
Movements in the boxes can be random. PredPol
allows the work of officers in the field to be monitored,
measuring their contribution to the proactive portion
of their working time often through a simple dissuasive
presence, for an optimized duration, in the areas where
the risk is estimated to be the highest. Outside of this
proactive portion, officers can devote themselves to
other tasks.
Hunchlab oriented the development of its instru-
ment according to the same aim of the dosage of patrols
through the integration of GPS data, but its approach
was significantly different. The time of the dosage was
defined not as a percentage of daily working time, but
on the basis of key performance indicators (KPIs):
quantitative measures of returns chosen to account
for police activity in relationship to predefined object-
ives. The difficulties with this method lay mainly in the
choice of indicators, in particular their feasibility and
usefulness. In collaboration with actors in the field,
Hunchlab chose three KPI indicators of patrol activity:
Minutes on Mission (the time spent visiting mission),
Good Mission Sessions (the number of visits to a mis-
sion that likely represent a meaningful dose),
Cleared Missions (at least three good mission sessions
during a shift).
The machine thus uses a dashboard which displays
several KPIs to push the police officers to vary the style
of patrols on their missions (the equivalent of PredPol’s
‘‘boxes’’). Aside from the definition of these activity
indicators, Hunchlab plans to develop dosing informa-
tion at a more granular level. The challenge today is for
machines to use GPS data to compare the behaviors of
patrols and detect efficient patrolling patterns.
Benbouzid
Compstat would thus become a platform that collects
data in order to support continual progression in the
logic underlying the dosage of patrols.
Clearly, then, whether in the case of PredPol or
Hunchlab, predictive information is not only a projec-
tion into the future, but it is also a tool for establishing
a quantitative equivalence between the value of work
and the production of security. From saturation
through quotas, which worked as performance metrics,
police systems moved to the optimization of patrols
through the dosimeter. This shift from quotas to dos-
imeters can be understood as a form of integration of
previous criticisms of Compstat. Compstat took on the
form of an application offering a concrete and softer
managerial solution: a dosimeter for activity, used to
control the production of safety, quantified as patrol-
ling time or particular ways of patrolling. Predictive
machines enable the quantity of work carried out by
police officers in the field to be controlled and super-
vised without the use of quotas. With such systems,
there is no need to wait for weekly meetings to motivate
officers to work. In real time, commanding officers
at different levels can control the public supply
of safety from behind their screens. The task of predict-
ive policing is to manage the daily time of police
presence, according to new managerial productivity
criteria.
The value of the patrol
Dosage is not only temporal, but it is also situational:
what are the situations to which police officers should
give priority when patrolling? To answer this question,
the companies developing predictive analysis platforms
complement risk scores with weighting metrics enabling
situations requiring police intervention to be ranked in
order of priority. A comparative analysis of these met-
rics in the PredPol and Hunchlab platforms shows that
risk can be weighted according to two different logics,
which have evolved over time with changes in how the
platforms conceive the relations between prediction,
policing, and the population.
PredPol offers a method that highlights the eco-
nomic aspect of police action. To do this, the platform
assesses the value of the patrol using a classical formula
for calculating return on investment
ROI ¼ ðGains  InvestmentcostsÞ=Investmentcosts
As indicated in a report on the study performed by a
PredPol doctoral student, this ratio, which is theoretic-
ally simple to specify, implies an evaluation of police
work in accounting terms through the establishment of
an equivalence between avoided costs (gains) and police
action (Samuels, 2014). To evaluate this measurable
7
return on investment, PredPol drew on the Rand
Corporation’s monetary estimation of the ‘‘cost of
crime.’’ This provides a single summary value allowing
the police to measure its predictive action in investment
terms, expressing the prediction as a monetary value.
This accounting evaluation classifies situations by
degree of priority using a ‘‘safety production function’’
couched in terms of monetary costs and benefits.
PredPol thus automated the economic analysis of
police action, in a rudimentary but operational and
effective manner. In other words, prediction became
the vehicle for a commoditization of police action.
Hunchlab, on the other hand, has been working to
develop a platform that integrates political choices con-
cerning public action. In keeping with the aims of the
Task Force on 21st-Century Policing created by
President Barack Obama in 2015, notably that of
adopting ‘‘model policies and best practices for technol-
ogy-based community engagement that increases com-
munity trust and access’’ (Final Report of the
President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing,
2015), the Hunchlab platform proposes to rank the pri-
ority of situations for patrols in a more open manner
than PredPol. Four different ways of weighting crimes
are proposed:
1/Police department decided weights. We don’t really
recommend this because we think it makes more sense
for the police department to rely on some 3rd party
assessment of severity, but it is a possible option. 2/
Cost of crime numbers. The benefit here is that many
types of costs to society can be incorporated into one
number. It also makes it easier to talk about different
types of community investment because the crime fore-
casts are also expressed in dollars. The downside is that
the published cost of crime numbers are not granular
and are only available for major types of incidents. 3/
Sentencing guidelines A benefit here is that sentencing
guidelines are available for every distinct classification
of incident, so it is very granular. If we set the weights
to the sentencing guidelines, then the system is optimiz-
ing to prevent incidents such that the total length of
sentences is reduced – essentially trying to reduce the
‘need’ for incarceration by preventing events with
longer sentences. A criticism that some will bring up
would be that sentencing guidelines don’t always reflect
actual harm to the community. For instance, drug inci-
dents have longer sentences than are likely warranted.
4/ Public process. What we are pushing towards is such
a public or semi-public engagement process to set
weights. (Interview with Jeremy Heffner, Hunchlab
Data Scientist, July 2016)
These four metrics reflect a graduated variation in con-
ceptions of the politicization of the algorithm in terms
8 Big Data & Society
of the primacy given to the administration or to the
interests of the sovereign population. The first weight-
ing gives priority to the administrative level, the second
gives it to economic calculation, the third integrates the
legal system’s sense of justice,3 and the last submits the
administration to the sovereignty of the population.
With four different ways of weighting, Hunchlab
offers the user of the program the freedom to think
the model of relations between police power (the
administration) and political power (the public).
While the PredPol platform frames police adminis-
tration as a business whose aim is profitability,
Hunchlab presents the administration of the digital
system as a fully fledged administrative system, con-
taining the contradictions and tensions inherent in the
public administrations of Western democracies
(Rosanvallon, 2015). The opposition between the two
approaches is a classical one: on the one hand, PredPol
embodies a form of reasoning that fits within the long-
standing process of the naturalization of the economic
analysis of public action; on the other hand, Hunchlab
offers a politicization by offering the user a choice
among multiple weightings. Hunchlab even goes as
far as to open the weightings to discussion with the
population.
But both platforms set out to integrate evaluation
metrics that were previously used in ex ante or
ex post form at Compstat meetings, in itenere, at the
level of police officers’ daily activity. The need to for-
malize these metrics within the platforms imposes the
requirement of making the values involved in the choice
of one or another police tactic more explicit. Should the
police be viewed as an organization that must be eco-
nomically profitable, or as a service focused on
responding to the demands and concerns of the popu-
lation? The developers of PredPol answered this ques-
tion themselves by coding the calculation of ROI into
their machine; Hunchlab allows police actors to answer
it themselves in the system administration interface. In
any case, predictive policing requires the values attrib-
uted to the patrol to be made explicit. The presence
of police in public space is now systematically asso-
ciated to a continuous operation of evaluation
(Dussauge et al., 2015) which can be parametrized
and automated.
Discrimination and ‘‘policing harm’’
Today, these predictive machines and their metrics, like
Compstat before them, are facing criticism in their turn.
While they seem to offer alternatives to the logic of
quotas and racial profiling by patrolling officers, these
machines have increasingly been the focus of critiques
of ‘‘algorithmic bias,’’ which hold that predictions rein-
force police discrimination against minorities
(Ferguson, 2016; Robinson and Koepke, 2016; Selbst,
2018; Shapiro, 2017).
In a context marked by activist mobilization in the
United States, both PredPol and Hunchlab have had no
choice but to respond decreased to these critiques, inte-
grating the problem of algorithmic biases into the pro-
cess of machine design. The developers of PredPol have
engaged in research auditing the impact of learning
data, while those of Hunchlab have sought to regulate
and optimize ‘‘policing harms’’—negative effects caused
by police proactivity.4 The reactions of PredPol and
Hunchlab offer insights into the ways in which the pro-
moters of such platforms can devise means to control
biases and to develop metrics for regulating police
action.
Managing biases
Since its creation, there have been many criticisms of
PredPol, but the developers have responded publicly
only to those alleging discriminatory biases. The
charges of the nonprofit association Human Rights
Data Analysis Group particularly interested PredPol.
In their study ‘‘To Predict and Serve’’ (Lum and
Isaac, 2016), the group published an analysis of the
effects of the PredPol algorithm based on a digital
stimulation. The demonstration is simple. They pro-
jected the spatial distribution of drug arrests, con-
structed from data recorded by the police, on a map
of the city of Oakland. It is immediately clear that
arrests are concentrated in neighborhoods with pre-
dominantly nonwhite and low-income populations. If
these arrest data are fed into the machine learning pro-
cess, it is not surprising that the PredPol algorithms
contain this discriminatory bias. The simulation, car-
ried out using PredPol’s predictive model, shows that
blacks are indeed twice as likely to be targeted by pre-
dictive policing as whites, and that the likelihood of
arrest of persons classified in any category other than
white is 1.5 times greater than that of whites. But the
crucial question is whether there is a feedback loop,
that is whether the results of predictions then become
further learning data which reinforce and increase the
unequal distribution of arrests in the population.
Illustrating the typical case of demands for productivity
as in Compstat, the simulation showed a reinforcement
of inequalities in arrests over time as the algorithm
learned from arrest data produced on the basis of
actions recommended by the algorithm itself.
PredPol developers defended themselves with a two-
fold response to these critiques. The first response was a
demonstration that the situation is less alarming than
the critique suggested. In their article entitled ‘‘Does
Predictive Policing Lead to Biased Arrests? Results
From a Randomized Controlled Trial’’ (Brantingham
Benbouzid 9

Figure 1. Graphs from Brantingham (2017: 482) showing the effect of biases (on upgrading, at top, and on downgrading, at bottom)
on the learning process for the three parameters in the model (from left to right, concentration, contagion, and the temporal window
of contagion). Each graph represents the mean and the one standard deviation range of the parameters estimated based on the model,
for five independent simulations, systematically applied to six variant levels of bias (from 0 to 20%). The dotted red line shows the
value of the initial parameters of the model, that is the model that was used to generate the data and that served as a reference for the
experiment. The light gray band shows the range of natural variation in the parameter (0% of data biased). The minimum quantity of
biased data needed to distinguish natural variation in the parameters observed in unbiased situations can thus easily be seen.

et al., 2018), the PredPol developers analyzed data from
a randomized controlled trial carried out in 2011 in Los
Angeles to test the efficiency of their machine (Mohler
et al., 2015). Comparing the distribution of arrests by
patrols according to ethnic variables (as reported by the
police officers themselves) for areas where no algorith-
mic recommendations were made (control group) with
those where PredPol was used (treatment group), the
study demonstrated that the activity produced by pre-
dictive policing is neither more nor less discriminatory
than the existing practices of patrols.
A second response was formulated in an article pub-
lished in a special issue of the Ohio State Journal of
Criminal Law on predictive policing (Brantingham,
2017). This study was based on a simulation, but
involved a more sophisticated construction of the prob-
lem of algorithmic bias than that of PredPol’s detrac-
tors. The civil rights organization’s criticisms of
PredPol deviated from the reality of practice: the
PredPol algorithm learns not from arrest data, but
mainly from crimes reported to the police by the
public. As Brantingham points out in his article,
while all the debate has focused on biases against mino-
rities in arrests, the input data is reported criminal
incidents, rather than criminal acts directly captured
by police officers. According to Brantingham (2017):
some pathways bring police into contact with victims,
while others bring police into contact with suspects. In
the former case, implicit bias will seek to minimize vic-
timization through the downgrading of crimes. In the
latter, implicit bias will seek to maximize liability
through upgrading of crimes.
‘‘Downgrading’’ implies police under-activity, while
‘‘upgrading’’ produces overactivity. In other words, if
the bias concerns the victims, the police minimize vic-
timization (downgrading), whereas if it concerns sus-
pects, then they produce discrimination (upgrading).
Brantingham sought to evaluate the effect of these
biases on the machine’s learning processes, by obser-
ving (from simulations) the extent to which downgrad-
ing and upgrading affected the different estimated
parameters in the model. Brantingham discovered
that the impact of the biases on the different compo-
nents of the model differed, but that the impact of
biases on estimated risk was difficult or impossible to
distinguish from the natural variation in the parameters
10
observed in situations without bias (Figure 1).
Brantingham nonetheless succeeded in estimating a
rate of bias beyond which estimated risk moved
beyond the range of natural variations: above 20% of
events subject to bias for downgraded crimes, and only
above 5% for upgraded crimes. If the problem of dis-
crimination can be translated into mathematical terms,
and thus into metrics, then it may be possible to con-
struct algorithms able to measure, manage, and correct
biases.
Optimizing harms
Responding to criticisms of discrimination in predictive
policing is not simply a matter of resolving the problem
of algorithmic biases. In a democratic society, the
police conduct stop and frisk on a low percentage of
the population, but some proportion of these stop and
frisk reveals no criminal activity, and they can in some
cases target wrongly suspected persons. A certain quan-
tity of stop and frisk on the population is acceptable if
the result is safety for the population. In other words,
fruitless police stop and frisk on wrongly suspected per-
sons are legitimate insofar as they are needed to pro-
duce of a supply of proactive policing, and only to the
extent that these stop and frisk continue to benefit the
population (Bambauer, 2014).
But in reality there is a disconnection between the
population that benefits from the safety advantages of
police proactivity and that which pays its costs in the
form of unwarranted or inappropriate police stops
(Harmon, 2012, 2015; Huq, 2016). This unavoidably
harmful component of proactive policing is not randomly
distributed in the population. It is concentrated on a
minority who are in spatial and social proximity to sus-
pected criminals. The main political problem in policing
is that of the just distribution of harmful police action in
the population and the associated regulation (Harmon
2012). Could protective machines not simply respond
to this crucial problem as well by regulating day-to-day
police work in such a way as to minimize the resulting
harm caused to the population? How can data on police
activity be strategically used at the operational level to
decrease the frequency and impact of these harms?
In a white paper that is currently in preparation:
‘‘Using Data to Reduce Policing Harms,’’5 Hunchlab
attempts to answer these questions by imagining how
this unavoidable harmful portion of proactive police
work could be reduced using a calculation. While it is
difficult to model all of the harms caused by police
action, Hunchlab proposes to deal with the portion of
policing harm produced by patrolling activities in public
places, that is all ordinary interactions that are nega-
tively experienced by the population, in particular stop
and frisks that do not reveal any criminal activity. After
Big Data & Society
a stop, officers fill in a form that records various aspects
of the situation, including the demographic characteris-
tics of the suspect, the time and the place, the suspected
crime, and the reason for the stop. After stopping some-
one, officers can proceed to frisk the person if they have
a reasonable suspicion. The officers can also carry out a
search if they believe that they have probable cause to
suspect criminal activity. An officer can then decide to
make an arrest or issue a summons, all of which is rec-
orded on the form. The responses are then normalized,
compiled, and made accessible as open data. A startup
such as Hunchlab can thus easily use these data to ana-
lyze the contexts in which stops occur, and thus calculate
the probability of fruitless stops.
In the white paper, Hunchlab presents the scenario
of a machine that recommends patrol trajectories as a
function of a more or less acceptable quantity of fruit-
less stops distributed in the population. But how should
this quantity be distributed in space and time? As we
saw above, predictive machines are designed not only
to predict crime, but also to optimize the allocation of
resources in order to maximize the public supply of
safety: predictive policing takes a method of cost–
benefit calculation which relates the total cost of mobi-
lized resources to the expected gains in well-being
associated to the dissuasion of avoided criminal activ-
ities and integrates it into a machine. Hunchlab pro-
poses to extend this economic reasoning to the problem
of reducing policing harms: if the police unavoidably
cause disturbances as they produce safety, these can be
considered negative externalities of the production of a
public good. Policing harms represented nonnegligible
portion of the cost of policing, which can be integrated
into the calculation of the safety production function
on which the dosage of patrols is based.
How should police activity be regulated in order to
minimize the negative external costs that the police
imposes on the population, while supporting it in the
task of maintaining order? Well the white paper does
not provide a precise definition of the concept of an
externality linked to policing harms, it seems clear
that the authors’ approach is inspired by methods
used in environmental economics, and in particular
those developed around the regulation of polluting
businesses. The production of day-to-day safety can
be treated as analogous to that of polluting goods: it
generates diffuse negative externalities, with a low level
of harm per individual, but which affect a large number
of persons. While the white paper avoids the issue of
the calculation of the quantitative value of the negative
externality of police activity (mentioning only the pos-
sibility of a survey asking individuals about the stop
and frisk they are willing to undergo in order to benefit
from greater safety), it nonetheless offers some details
on how these harms could be regulated. The principle
Benbouzid
used in environmental economics, of the gradual intro-
duction of a system of progressive taxation, proposed
in order to incite polluters to internalize negative
externalities, could be transposed to public safety:
For some harms, like fruitless stops, a graduated-pro-
gressive approach to magnitude — that is, a model that
ratchets up the marginal harm of each additional fruit-
less stop as the total number goes up, as in progressive
taxation — could help capture the more diffuse aspects
of policing harms. (Using Data to Reduce Policing
Harms, document in progress not yet publicly
available)
And it is indicated through a citation: ‘‘This is the
standard method of assessing theoretically optimal
amounts of tax for actors that produce large but diffuse
externalities. See, for example, Cremer, Gahvari, and
Ladoux, Externalities and Optimal Taxation,
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS (1997)’’
(Using Data to Reduce Policing Harms, document in
progress not yet publicly available). Hunchlab shows
that this approach to regulation can have a complex
structure. If during two simultaneous road stops,
aimed, for example, at obtaining information on
recent gang activities in an area, where the two drivers
are equally likely to provide relevant information and
to possess a firearm, should the police question the
driver who has been subjected to three fruitless stops
in the last month, or the one who has not had any
contact with the police in more than a year? Once a
driver’s identity is known, the machine could invite offi-
cers to abstain from performing a search, or, in con-
trast, could encourage them to do so, as function of the
associated harms. In sectors where exposure to police
activity is relatively high due to particular problems
with crime, an algorithm could limit the contacts of
the police with the public as a function of the more
or less balanced distribution of stops across different
sectors. But how a machine could distribute policing
harms fairly in the population? By dosing patrols in a
way that involves a gradual imposition of algorithmic
control that progressively limits the number of asso-
ciated stops and the associated citations until a sort
of optimal level of policing harms is reached. In other
words, it is a matter of optimizing the acceptable quan-
tity of stops, in nonlinear fashion, in real time. By col-
lecting data on routine stops, a machine has an overall
view of the frequency of police stops over space and
time within the coverage area. It thus acts as a sort of
moral intelligence which, at a given moment, is
informed about trends in crime, the situation of
resources in the coverage area, and the distribution of
stops of innocent persons. It encourages the police to
behave in certain ways based on a calculation of the
11
acceptable threshold of policing harms. The Hunchlab
white paper offers a glimpse of the first bricks in an
operational solution to the moral problem of the distri-
bution of police stops in a given population, by means
of an optimal allocation of police resources for the least
necessary ‘‘common harm.’’
Conclusion
What does this examination of the historical develop-
ment and content of predictive machines in policing
contribute? It enables us to understand predictive poli-
cing as a management tool for increasing the product-
ivity of the police and reinforcing the sense of political
legitimacy of policing among the population. By
developing predictive platforms that collect and process
data flows in real time in order to coordinate police
activity in the field, the developers of these systems pro-
pose a new way to manage police work organization.
For example, the integration of stop and frisk quotas
(which Skogan (2017) defines as an agency strategy in
the Compstat process) requires officers to be proactive
during their patrols according to production objectives
established by their superiors. Officers are not simply
encouraged to ‘‘make their numbers’’ by their bosses,
but are continually monitored by a predictive machine
designed to produce particular metrics of safety in real
time. In other words, predictive platform developers
seek to solve the problem of proactivity in policing:
optimizing the daily vigilance of patrols in space and
time and minimizing the amount of stop and frisk in the
population. As a result, predictive policing is less a tool
about the anticipation of crime a more like a dosage
machine of safety in the continuity of Compstat. Of
course, the metrics used to define safety and harm are
subjective to debate, particularly as they are balanced
against each other. In this case, driven by a desire to
make this dosage fair, developers try to limit the algo-
rithmic biases into the process of machine design and
imagine an algorithmic solution that recommends
patrol trajectories as a function of a more or less
acceptable quantity of fruitless stops distributed in the
population. PredPol or Hunchlab try to compute a
quantitative norm that not only distributes safety in
the population, but also corrects police behavior, and,
thereby, reflect the right of each person to be protected
against excessive stops guaranteed by the Fourth
Amendment. To predict crime is to integrate rules for
action into machine parameters—the cybernetic
imaginary of grounding social harmony in calculations
(Supiot, 2015).
As predictive policing private companies become
more active actors in public safety policies, they must
be continued to be closely followed by sociological
inquiries. Understanding how these new actors help
12
guide choices, give specific meaning to public action,
and produce ‘‘algorithmic’’ rules that govern safety
will be fundamental to understanding the practice of
policing in our data and algorithm rich society.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Bilel Benbouzid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8515-1718
Notes
1. This study was carried out as part of the INNOX
(L’innovation dans l’expertise. Simulation et modélisa-
tion comme mode d’action publique) project, funded by
the ANR Sociétés innovantes (INOV2013) program. This
article is a translated version from French and slightly
revised from: Benbuzid, Bilel. ‘‘Quand Prédire, c’est
gérer. La police prédicrive aux Etats-Unis’’, Re´seaux,
vol. 211, no. 5, 2018, pp. 221–256.
2. To study PredPol, in 2013 I interviewed Sean
Malinowski, at the time police captain in the Foothill
Area in Los Angeles and head of the predictive policing
program, which was funded by the Bureau of Justice
Assistance. This was the program that made the first
trials of PredPol possible. I also interviewed the crime
analyst of the Foothill Area in Los Angeles. The study
on Hunchlab took place later, in 2016. I interviewed both
Robert Cheetham, the founder of Azavea, the company
that brought Hunchlab to market, and Jeremy Heffner,
the data scientist and project head for the second version
of Hunchlab. I published a first paper about the
PredPol’s algorithm analyzing the scientific side of pre-
diction (Benbouzid, 2017).
3. The use of the ‘‘crime harm index’’ organizes priorities
according to the criteria of the legal system. Here,
Hunchlab took their inspiration from the article of
Sherman et al. (2016).
4. Predpol is also interested in harm reduction (Mohler G,
Carter J and Raje R, 2018), but in a different way than
Hunchlab. For reasons of space constraints, we will not
discuss this dimension of Predpol’s work.
5. This white paper, which is in preparation, is not publicly
available. It has been produced as a collaboration
between Jeremy Heffner, the product manager and data
scientist for the second version of Hunchlab, and Kiel
Brennan-Marquez, a legal scholar at the University of
Connecticut School of Law.
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