Prediction and Empire: How Imperial Formations Make Policing Possible in Santiago, Chile

• In Event: 20459 - New Frontiers of Globalization

Abstract

In 2011, Santiago, Chile, witnessed a critical transformation as the national police transitioned from officer-driven crime control to evidence-based policing. While the former approach attempts to suppress crime based on random patrol and reactive investigations, the latter institutionalizes the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD), a proactive form of ‘broken windows’ policing that deploys predictive algorithms, spatial data systems, and network models to forecast where crime is likely to occur and who is probably involved. Supported by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and Altegrity Risk International, a global risk consulting company led by William Bratton (former chief of the NYPD and LAPD), STAD expanded law enforcement’s interventions in marginalized areas experiencing high levels of crime and poverty. In this paper, I ask, what explains this unprecedented shift to predictive crime control if previous policies were already working? Was STAD simply the result of a North-South policy transfer and the US’ power penetration in Chile? Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, including 46 in-depth interviews and over 1,000 pages of archival materials, I argue that STAD was the result of a relational process of imperial isomorphism, which describes how the IADB’s financial aid and Altegrity’s technical assistance mirror old metropolitan states and exercise epistemic compliance and the commodification of US policing to rule, namely sovereign Chilean actors and agencies, and shape their policymaking at the core of the penal field. While negotiating these pressures, local bureaucrats redefine predictive policing on their own terms to navigate struggles for democratization with the national police in the penal field. As a theoretical framework, imperial isomorphism demonstrates how and why domestic shifts in crime control rely on specific regimes of imperial formations that occur not despite but through the agency of local bureaucrats.

Author

• Enrique Alvear Moreno, Marquette University