Pre-Emptive Big Data Surveillance and its (Dis)Empowering Consequences: The Case of Predictive Policing

Abstract

An abundance of literature has been published on the empowering and disempowering effects of Big Data for advertising, medicine, climate change, social sciences, and many more social domains from a legal perspective, a business perspective, and a critical data/surveillance studies perspective (Manovich 2011; Boydand Crawford 2012; Tene and Polonetsky 2012; Kitchin 2013; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; Lyon 2014). However, not much attention has yet been paid to the effects of Big Data applications on citizens in the specific context of policing.

The main objective of this chapter, therefore, is to provide a better understanding of what predictive Big Data policing is and to discuss both the empowering and the disempowering effects of predictive Big Data policing as a form of pre-emptive surveillance.

Keywords: big data, pre-emptive surveillance, predictive policing, surveillance studies