COPtimization and the operational banality of policing's technocratic drive

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5100974
AutoresKrupar (0000-0001-9402-9338, Georgetown University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Fecha de publicación2025-08-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02637758251366029
OpenAlexW4413161609
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas75

Data-driven policing claims to be the neutral "evidence-based" remedy to policing's ongoing global crisis of legitimacy. This paper recasts the evolving techno-organizational formats of policing as neoliberal folklore, using the framework "folklore of optimization's operational banality" (FOOB) to explicate the brutal banality and operational power of organizational optimization. FOOB points to the moral imperative to optimize remaining operational (rather than truthful/accurate/effective) that underlies US policing's spatially-deterministic technocratic drive. Applying this methodological-conceptual intervention, the article brings together Broken Windows, CompStat, and "Common Operational Picture" (COP) in a US-based genealogy of "COPtimization" across managerial and territorial registers, from crime hot spots to PredPol prediction boxes. The paper then offers a case study of gunshot detection system ShotSpotter and the way environmental sensors automate and scale police command-and-control to the level of weaponized urban infrastructure. I argue ambient policing senses (extracts) and territorializes (pathologizes) problems in space for police intervention; the always-on surveillant platform triggers enforcement, further ontologizing spatial inequality and circumventing police reflexivity. In response to this mounting automation and platform logic of policing's techno-organization, the conclusion discusses counter-mapping practices that generate oppositional operational folklore, rejecting the technofetishistic imaginary of real-time police action and redefining problems and coding operations of/for social justice

Political science · Politics · Sociology · Technocracy · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Law · Policing Practices and Perceptions