On October 24th 2016, the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) launched the Ottawa Police Strategic Operations Centre (OPSOC), an initiative to “use crime information to improve public and officer safety” [1]. A February 2017 article appearing on Motherboard, a Vice News channel, instead labelled OPSOC as a manifestation of a larger movement in police forces towards “predictive policing” [2]. This is known as the collection and manipulation of data to “identify potential future criminals and to direct the patrolling of areas based on an analysis of historical crime data, records of arrests, and the known social networks of criminals” [3]. This particular example in Ottawa allows us to see how these policing systems are rationalized and how they evade accountability.

Rationalizing Surveillance

According to a Canadian Police Staffing Symposium Summary Report, OPSOC “assisted with over 70 calls for service in the first 10 days of operations including a gun call at high school, a demonstration on Parliament Hill, as well as missing persons, an armed robbery, a suicidal person with a firearm…” [4]. What is notable about this description is that it places a protest – a basic and fundamental act of democracy – with descriptions of high risk events. If demonstrations are continued to be labelled as high risk events, the rationale for surveilling demonstrations (and those who attend them) becomes relatively easy for the police service. Justification for any exercise of power becomes easy when armed with technologies that promote efficiency.

Mark Andrejevic (2016) writes that “security serves as an alibi for…warrantless data collection, and rapid, preemptive response”[5]. Andrejevic sees predictive policing as a “scenario of securitization” which “models future scenarios to act on them in the present” [6] . When the OPS speaks of OPSOC’s role in “frontline, day-to-day operations,” as well as on-scene “situational awareness” via massive amounts of information, they are speaking of a “fantasized perfection of prediction” [7].

Obscuring Accountability

There are many privacy, ethical and accountability concerns associated with OPSOC and predictive policing in general. According to Keith Guzik (2009), privacy is essential for the existence of a public, and “security of the public sphere allows individuals to come together to discuss social problems” [8]. A public that is under intense surveillance, however, is unable to accomplish that discussion.

Helen Nissenbaum (1996) writes that “lives, well being and quality of life are vulnerable to poor system design” [9]. This takes on a more dire tone when these systems are intended for policing, in that the police have abilities not only to regulate and protect lives, but also to take them away. This isn’t to say that OPSOC has poor system design, but rather that it is difficult for a civilian to assess the quality of the system as it is hidden in the “black-box” that we associate with algorithmic culture. OPSOC has a certain invisibility because it operates behind the modern fortress of the police station and behind the tinted windows of police cruisers. The ethics and accountability of policing, at this point in time, can only be interrogated when it is materialized into visible violence or discrimination. And even then, the interrogation is brief and does not often yield system altering results.

The materiality of OPS policies come to fruition with items like the reinforced gloves – which have been compared to brass knuckles in a report by the CBC – that were used by OPS Constable Daniel Montsion in the murder of 37-year-old Abdirahman Abdi [10]. If there is little accountability in an event like Abdi’s death, something so jarringly present in the physical world, then there is little hope for accountability in regard to the algorithms that run OPSOC. The militarization of police forces doesn’t just include the body armour, the tanks, and the helicopters. It includes software as well.

This piece was published as part of our guest blogger series! Mitch is a graduate student from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, who answered our call for submissions.

If you’re interested in contributing a guest blog post to Digital Tattoo, please contact our editorial team at: digital.tattoo@ubc.ca



*Banner image used under CC BY 2.0 from Flickr user Gregg Stokes.