“Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti-Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.
The system not only brings into view the hidden but no less deadly crimes of capitalism and the wealthy’s hoarding of resources, but includes an app that alerts users when they enter high-risk areas to encourage “citizen policing and awareness.” Taking it one step further, the development team is working on a facial recognition program meant to flag individuals who are likely perpetrators, and the training set used to design the algorithm includes the profile photos of 7,000 corporate executives downloaded from the popular professional networking site LinkedIn. Not surprisingly, the “averaged” face of a criminal is White and male. In this sense, the narrative of what we consider to be a crime and of whom we consider to be a criminal is being challenged. But it remains to be seen whether such initiatives can help generate a different social order when it comes to criminalization. And creative exercises like this one are comical only if we ignore that all their features are drawn directly from actually existing proposals and practices “in the real world,” including the use of facial images to predict criminality – all, techniques that tend to target racialized groups.“
