Logics of prevention, legibility and intervention: cartographical compositions of “crime” in predictive policing and in international crisis management

Abstract

This article contrasts two different logics of prevention that participate in contemporary crime governance: predictive policing and international crisis management. We demonstrate how, in the two cases analyzed here, “crime” is made legible as a problem, enabling different forms of intervention, based on the relocation of the police presence in the case of predictive policing, and on the diffusion of models of good governance in the case of international crisis management. We illustrate how both processes rely on the authoritative construction of risk cartographies to inform the adoption of such modes of intervention in the name of crime management. In these cartographies, the spatial distribution of risk is based, on the one hand, on the authority of statistical knowledge, and, on the other hand, on the presence of crisis experts in the "field". The forms of intervention prescribed in these contexts, in turn, reproduce a managerial reading of crime prevention, which prioritizes interventions focused on the management of crime as a conjunction of risks, relegating to the background structural elements that contribute to its existence and circumscribing, thus, its policy to the management of crises and events