PredPol is a technology sold to law enforcement agencies. It is an algorithm that looks a large set of data and uses it to predict areas on a map where crime might be taking place. It’s a specific example of what’s called predicative policing. The idea is that the algorithm tells police departments where they should deploy resources in order to arrive at crime scenes quickly, if not deter crime entirely.

Predictive policing has been criticized for encouraging police departments to over-police marginalized communities. In “Carceral Capitalism,” Jackie Wang argues that technologies like PredPol in fact produce criminality and/or criminal subjects. In other words, if this “fortune-telling” technology tells police officers that crime is likely taking place in an area, everyone in that area is automatically a suspect. She asks the reader to think about what it would mean to be in one of PredPol’s red squares. Are you automatically suspicious just by nature of being there? Should you have fewer rights in that square? And by what metric can this technology be judged? If the officer finds crime, is it because the algorithm was right or was it because the officer saw what he wanted to see? If the officer finds no crime, is it because he scared away the criminals, or was it because the algorithm was inaccurate? In general, critics find that technology like PredPol produce maps of under-served communities more than they predict police. Mistaking the former for the latter merely lends legitimacy to the over-policing of poor and/or minority communities.

In 2017, a team of artists Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne and Francis Tseng collaborated on a project that subverts this technology. They used an algorithm to not predict where petty crimes might be happening but rather to predict areas of possible financial crimes such as embezzlement, wage theft, money laundering, and fraud. “White Collar Crime Risk Zones” looks similar to PredPol: it’s a map with red squares that measure risk. But it is an inversion of the technology’s effects. Rather than encouraging the police to come down harder on the disadvantaged, it encourages the public to scrutinize criminals who misuse much larger sums of money and influence.

In this way, Clifton et al designed a form and staged an intervention in a dominant narrative. If the status quo is that police must protect us from criminals, then “White Collar Crime Risk Zones,” in turn asks us to reconsider who is the greater threat?