‘Smart’ crime prevention? Digitization and racialized crime control in a Smart City

Smart Cities, political rationalities and social order

The global Smart City movement—the theory and practice of optimizing urban life and business efficiency through internet connectivity, dispersed sensors and big data—promises many benefits. These include increased environmental sustainability and public ‘liveability’ through such technologically driven effects as: optimized energy usage; real-time traffic and pedestrian monitoring; micro-climate sensing; increased government responsiveness through social media; and improved business efficiency through the deployment of the Internet of Things (e.g. Deakin, 2013; Maclaren and Agyeman, 2015; Marrone and Hammerle, 2018; Peris-Ortiz et al., 2016). Thus, Australian Smart City programmes have aimed to:

Whatever the reality of these claimed benefits, which have been extensively queried (e.g. Sadowski and Bendor, 2019), Smart Cities have been valorized for their innovative contributions to the production of safer, more efficient and liveable, cities (e.g. Chiodi, 2016). Schuilenburg and Peeters (2018) for example examine developments in the Netherlands where Smart City technologies are deployed to exercise a form of pastoral power. In place of the exclusionary practices of traditional situational crime prevention, they examine how the technological manipulation of sensory stimuli such as light, sound and smell may be deployed to foster ‘positive’ moods and behaviours, and discourage problematic action, such as violence and drunkenness. On the other hand, criticisms have been raised about Smart City potentials for increased surveillance of the public, and intensifying micro-management of movement and the perpetuation of social injustices (Gabrys, 2014; Leszczynski, 2016). Thus, the deployment of big data and algorithmic governance in smart crime control has been highlighted as increasing the focus on those already identified as problematic—in particular visible, especially racial, minorities (e.g. Zavrsnik, 2018a). Such contrasts indicate that the impact of Smart Cities programmes on crime control cannot be read off in a technocratically deterministic fashion (as much of the promotional material assumes), but must be situated and analysed in specific contexts (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019a: 2). Nonetheless, it has been argued by others that even in inclusionary modes and instances, Smart Cities programmes foster the techno-centric and techno-utopian vision that social problems are soluble by innovative technical fixes. From this perspective, social problems are not the effect of entrenched social, political and economic inequities, but rather the consequence of a lack of inventiveness, imagination and technological know-how in the past (Eubanks, 2017).

Running through much of the critical literature is a view that Smart City approaches to social issues reflect neoliberal political rationalities, focusing on market-led solutions, addressing citizens primarily as consumers and entrepreneurs, and fostering private sector involvement (e.g. Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019b; Iveson, 2011; Lee et al., 2020; Marvin et al., 2016). This is also to be seen in the silencing of discourses that embed crime and social problems in complex and enduring socio-historical processes—instead, understanding them as individualized actions to be predicted algorithmically and manipulated by environmental design. But while the nexus between the Smart City and neoliberalism is often transparent, it is predominantly explored at a high level of generality. Yet, it is well recognized that neoliberalism is highly diverse (Cahill et al., 2018) and, as noted already, that Smart City discourses are strongly influenced by social, political, geographical and economic contexts (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019a, 2019b). Consequently, there have recently arisen calls to explore the different models of citizenship and subjectivity embedded in diverse Smart City programmes, the various political and economic rationalities they embrace and the specific ‘stakeholders’ that are to be included in, or excluded from, the envisaged future (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019a; Marvin and Luque, 2015).

In particular, as Marvin and Luque (2015: 2111) have stressed, there is limited exploration of the ways in which Smart City programmes are being rolled out in the global South. As indicated in studies of India (Datta, 2015) and South Africa (Odentaal, 2006), for example, enduring legacies of colonialism have done much to shape the nature and implications of Smart Cities projects. This is especially visible in the ways they imagine and reproduce structured social inequalities. Insofar as criminal justice plays a key role in the control of subject populations in colonial and neo-colonial settings, the digital ‘enhancing’ of public safety is likely to produce effects that are far removed from the benign and inclusionary models emerging in certain European cities. It is in this light that the focus of the present analysis explores the Switching on Darwin programme as projected by the City of Darwin Council in northern Australia.

Criminal justice in the neo-colonial city

Having studied law and political science I get the concept of liberty. But in the

practical real world of Mitchell Street when people are standing on street corners with their pants around their ankles blaring out expletives or baring their buttocks to passing cars, expectorating, fornicating, urinating, defecating and all the other things they do when they have a skinful of juba juice we can now say to the police ‘Go out, pull them out of circulation’.

(The Hon. John Elferink, Attorney-General for the Northern Territory) ²

While the general dimensions of racialized criminal justice in Australia may be familiar, it is essential to recognize major distinctions between the so-called ‘colonies of settlement’—primarily, the populous states of Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales (NSW) together with the metropolitan areas of Queensland and Western Australia—and the ‘outback’ regions of the latter two states; and, specifically, the Northern Territory (NT). Unlike the colonies of settlement, where Aboriginal populations were decimated by genocide and disease, and largely physically displaced by intensive agriculture and pastoralism, regions such as the NT take the form of colonies of exploitation—primarily featuring mining and dispersed pastoralism. ³ Here, vast areas have sparse European settlement, and the Indigenous population has remained relatively intact. Whereas in the 2016 census Aboriginal people made up less than 1% of the population of Victoria, and 3.4% of that in NSW, they made up a third of the NT population, and much more in the interior regions. Most of this Indigenous population remains ‘outside’ the local economy, which has only limited demands for labour. The result, as Blagg (2008) has described it, is a governmental orientation towards Indigenous people characterized extensively by ‘waste management’, in which criminal justice has long been a principal tool. In this setting, Darwin, the state capital, remains a relatively small (population about 136,000), overwhelmingly European-style city. Its neo-colonial status is highlighted by the fact that while over 90% of its population is non-Indigenous, Darwin is the main centre for the administration of largely Indigenously populated hinterland. ⁴

In this sense, we characterize Darwin not as postcolonial per se, a term that perhaps may be applied to other Australian capitals, but rather as a neo-colonial city: one in which the social, politico and economic structure in key respects perpetuates that of traditional colonial cities. ⁵ This is also reflected in the exaggerated level of cumulative disadvantage affecting the Indigenous population, even when compared to the colonies of settlement.

On almost every key indicator covering social isolation, housing, poverty, access to health care, longevity, infant mortality, mental health, alcoholism, unemployment and education, Darwin’s Aboriginal population appears heavily and chronically disadvantaged. Moreover, to a considerable extent, Aboriginal people live outside the formal economy (Zhao et al., 2016). ⁶ As will later be noted, it is remarkable, therefore, that this social fact is scarcely—if at all—mentioned in the Switching on Darwin discourse, with its neoliberal stress on improving the social liveability, prosperity, safety and inclusiveness of the city via technological infrastructure and digitally driven transformation. Even so, as Blagg’s (2008) analysis suggests, it is with respect to the criminal justice system that such ‘colonial’ inequalities are registered most clearly and starkly. On average, Aboriginal adults are about 10 times overrepresented in Darwin’s criminal justice system. Thus, in the year 2016–2017 (the year the Switching on Darwin programme was first drafted), Aboriginal people made up 84% of the daily prison population. For Aboriginal young people in youth detention centres, the figure is nearer 95% (Hunyor, 2016: 5). From a total of 1886 corrections orders, 1594 were applied to persons identified as Aboriginal. On a population basis, while the overall rate of adult imprisonment (including Aboriginal prisoners) was 198 per 100,000, for Aboriginal people the rate was 2844 per 100,000. Although the Correctional Services took pains to point out that the degree of Aboriginal overrepresentation was less than that of Western Australia, another colony of exploitation, it was 18% higher than the national average. Moreover, the median sentence for Aboriginal offenders in Darwin’s prisons was 237 days, almost twice that for non-Aboriginal offenders (122 days). ⁷

While Aboriginal overrepresentation in criminal justice has been a persistent problem for decades, certainly since before the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, in the period leading up to the formation of the Switching on Darwin programme, this issue became ever more prominent. This was largely due to the introduction of ‘paperless arrest powers’ granted under The Police Administration Act (2015). In brief, this legislation gave police the power to detain for up to four hours, without issuing an infringement notice or charge, persons suspected of summary offences. Such offences would normally include disorderly behaviour, swearing in public and making excessive noise. From the police perspective, this change was said to be generated out of a concern with ‘excessive amounts of paperwork’; although elsewhere, the NT Attorney General described it in rather different terms as ‘an effective law in terms of policing our streets’ (quoted in Hunyor, 2016: 4). Objected to both by the Criminal Lawyers’ Association of the Northern Territory as ‘open to abuse’, and by the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) as indicative of ‘a police state’, the law was unsuccessfully challenged in the High Court of Australia in 2016. In the following seven months, 1295 persons—more than 70% of them Aboriginal—were detained under the law (Hunyor, 2016: 6). At the inquest of an Aboriginal man who died in custody while detained under the law, the NT Coroner described it as ‘retrogressive’ and called for its repeal because of its disproportionate and harmful impact on Aboriginal people (NTMC, 2016: 90).

It is against this neo-colonial backdrop of entrenched socio-economic inequality, and especially a racialized criminal justice system, that the Switching on Darwin programme was initiated. We will argue that in the City of Darwin, much of the ‘smart’ technology being introduced, especially in the current phase, is directed at the monitoring and control of Aboriginal people in public places. Nowhere is this fact mentioned, neither in the promotional discourse nor in the objections raised in the local media. Thus, while a key focus is on ‘safety’—the safety of a seemingly non-racialized general public—who or what offers a threat to this safety is never identified nor outlined beyond a generalized category of ‘crime’.

Switching on Darwin and the Smart Cities Plan

This project will implement city-scale smart infrastructure in Darwin including smart service (lighting, parking, wi-fi) integrated through an open IoT platform. Smart technology will contribute to city rejuvenation and together with open data, will help to stimulate new partnerships and business growth, creating new job opportunities and helping to combat social and safety challenges.

(www.darwin.nt.gov.au › council › smart-darwin › overview)

On the face of things, the Australian Government’s 2016 ‘Smart Cities Plan’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2016) focuses on some key social issues that cities exhibit, noting that ‘congestion, poor access to jobs and services, reduced housing affordability and increasing pollution can challenge the quality of life’. Elsewhere in the world, programmes have been introduced in ways that extensively and dramatically reshape cities (Townsend, 2014). However, one of the striking features of the Smart Cities programme in Australia has been its focus on small scale and highly delimited infrastructural interventions—in part, necessitated by the limited budget (AUS$27.7 million dispersed among 49 successful applicants) allocated to the first round in 2017. Successful applications, for example, involved:

Across all 49 of the successful Smart Cities projects in the round of applications for federal funding, the principal focus was on similar issues. ⁸ Perhaps taking their cues from the Federal Government’s stated vision, the only other issue of prominence among successful applicants was that of ‘public safety’, which, clearly from the content of applications, is proxy for crime prevention and governance.

Against this very modest backdrop of applications, the City of Darwin’s Switching on Darwin proposal (which received AUS$5 million in federal funds, and a further AUS$5 million from the Northern Territory Government) was relatively ambitious. Darwin’s broad understanding of the Smart City project was that it would be characterized by ‘effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens’. The overriding vision was that the Smart City was part of a movement away from an historical ‘over-reliance on the resource sector toward “the fourth industrial revolution”’, an exercise to be effected through the use of ‘transformative technologies to connect the physical world and the digital world’ (https://www.darwin.nt.gov.au/sites/default/files/file/agendas-minutes/attachments/city_of_darwin_smartdarwin_strategy_final.pdf, accessed 20 April 2020).

Of course, the symbolism of the language deployed here is as interesting as it is revealing about the rationalities and aspirations of the programme architects and advocates. It connotes that prior to technological augmentation by infrastructures of smartness, the city was effectively ‘switched off’ socially and economically, and shrouded in ‘darkness’. Darwin city authorities envisaged a phased roll-out of smart technologies coupled with the aim of ‘building a base capacity to collect, store, analyse and use big data’. Many aspects of the programme are linked closely with this aim—for example: parking sensors to effect more efficient traffic flows; water monitors to guide consumption; weather warnings and local climate data gathering to prepare citizens for comfort and safety; smart technologies for public transport; and pedestrian monitoring to increase access to services, marketing opportunities for local businesses and public safety. However, perhaps significantly in light of the ‘key social issues’ confronting Darwin, first cabs off the implementation rank were the questionably ‘transformative’ technologies of enhanced vision CCTV cameras, algorithmically driven geofencing software and improved LED street lighting.

For Darwin’s Council, the overall project promises an array of benefits, namely ‘community safety’ (the first named benefit), ⁹ ‘improved services’, ‘environmental sustainability’, ‘innovation’ (primarily through data gathering and dissemination, and more sophisticated forms of analytics) and ‘improved public spaces’. In effect, the latter, primarily said to be achieved through the use of CCTV to monitor the movement of people and traffic, also maps closely onto underpinning crime prevention agendas (www.darwin.nt.gov.au). The array of specific technologies to be mobilized early in the programme included LED lighting that was animated by smart controls linked with daylight sensors, and the rolling out of a much-expanded CCTV network. These ‘hard’ electronic technologies were the most visible and salient aspect of the programme, and constituted the first components installed. As it is turning out, they are also the most contentious feature of the scheme. Much of the public concern being staged and circulated in the local media has arisen over the perception that such changes have increased the surveillant power and capacity of the government and police, and, in particular, represent a threat to individual privacy and liberty. In key respects, we will suggest, this focus—both on the surveillant assemblage and the resistant concerns regarding governmental overreach and interference—are indicative of a re-coding of the city, in which a homogeneous ‘public’ simultaneously is constituted in other than socioeconomic and (especially) racialized terms. Objections also partly focus on the potential for a colonization of the city by models of social control that have emerged in China, as well as concerns about data capitalism and data security. A distinct silence pertains to the very real prospect of the system being used to sharpen a criminalizing gaze on the predominantly marginalized and excluded bodies of the Indigenous people living in and around the city.

Conclusion: Monopolizing or diversifying Smart Cities?

The scale and geographic dispersal of the Smart Cities movement is hard to overstate. There are almost countless Smart City programmes in existence ranging from cities designed from scratch around the Internet of Things, such as Songdo in South Korea, through city-wide and ubiquitous informatics programmes as introduced in Stockholm, down to schemes that merely address single issues such as parking, garbage disposal and street lighting (as outlined in various Australian cities, noted already). Accordingly, there is no universal diagram of the Smart City, and generalization across the board is unrealistic. While many of these programmes do not directly address crime control—although this is often a prominent theme—a characteristic focus on improving urban ‘liveability’ means that crime and antisocial behaviours are always potential targets, even if not explicitly or initially envisaged as such. Also, because much recent innovation in crime control has focused on remote sensing and big data techniques (Smith et al., 2017; Zavrsnik, 2018b), there is very often a compatible crime control penumbra waiting to be incorporated into new and existing Smart City programmes. As this suggests, the Smart City movement provides a commercially engineered theory and practice, adaptable to almost any national or cultural context, not merely for extending crime control measures and actions, but more significantly, for integrating them with informatics-based governance of every aspect of urban life. For this reason, it is something that demands closer attention than criminology has so far given it.

Insofar as the Smart City crime control model may be broadly characterized, it is by the fact that it addresses the modulation of behaviours rather than their underlying causes. As Shuilenburg and Peeters’s (2018) work indicates, this may take seemingly benign forms (although worrying in a Brave New World way), as readily as taking the more malign shape observed in Darwin. There is, however, no reason to see this general characteristic as a necessity. The Internet of Things is well able to confront structural issues that much criminology regards as driving and shaping criminal offending and antisocial behaviour (Marvin et al., 2016). That this is not a prominent characteristic of Smart Cities may well be due to the influence of neoliberalism which is so tightly bound up in the making and animating of the Smart City. But as the case of Darwin indicates, the manifestation of deep structural issues in habits of governance—here, the reproduction of their neo-colonial foundations—suggests the need to look beyond such relatively simple (and very labile) formulae. Thus, while Darwin’s programme has many of the hallmarks associated with neoliberalism—the focus on consumption, the faith in technological fixes, the eschewal of structural causation—these are mobilized in ways that are far from ‘transformative’. While neoliberalism may have revolutionized areas of the economy and refigured social relations in profound ways, when situated in the spatial and cultural bedrock of a neo-colonial state and society, its expression in the ‘Smart’ technologies of ‘transformation’ reproduces colonial relations, albeit in ever more coded and sophisticated ways.

Switching on Darwin illustrates, in addition, the ways in which ‘smart’ crime prevention embeds crime control in broader, problematic (and perhaps characteristically neoliberal) visions of citizenship. In part, this is effected through imagining improvement in the condition of Indigenous people and their culture through enmeshment in the entrepreneurial spirit—and cyberphysical materialization—of the Smart City, albeit in a way that local Aboriginal people regard as oppressive and exploitative. It is hard to see how this could have any significant, positive impact on the subjection of Aboriginal people through criminal justice, and in transparent ways, it operates to reproduce long-standing and socially entrenched colonial practices of cultural appropriation. More significantly, by advocating an informatics-focused model of the future citizen—where they are very much positioned, constructed and coded via their digital practices and corresponding data proxies—Smart City programmes valorize ways of participation in government, the economy and urban life through technologies that are disproportionately less accessible to minorities and the marginalized.

The analysis of Switching on Darwin highlights the ways in which the global Smart Cities movement may digitally enhance the production of public safety in highly reductionist, selective and problematic ways. The specific concatenation of neo-colonialism and neoliberalism shaping the redesign of Darwin is not necessarily the outcome of the merging of big data and digital technology that is so central to the Smart Cities imaginary. Crucially, we want to suggest that the questions which keep trying to surface are not whether and how Smart Cities can deliver public safety, but rather, which public’s safety is at the heart of the programmes that mobilize the technologies; and can such techno-centric diagrams and infrastructures of the contemporary city be reimagined and reprogrammed to engage with these other—especially criminalized—publics?

It would be possible, for example, to imagine police BodyWorn and vehicle cameras, custody suite and prison cell cameras, as well as numerous other data sensors and criminal justice statistical data, connecting up with the internet and/or public platforms in ways to govern this other public’s safety and better produce accountability relations through splintering sousveillance practices. What we are alluding to here is something of a real-time public dashboard which would integrate and illustrate different temporalities and spatialities of criminal justice processes. But even this imagines a digital and technocratic solution to what are deeply entrenched and complex social and historical problems, while—to some degree—reproducing a Deleuzian-style societies of control mentality. The Smart City model and mantra will not simply go away, even if its current iterations may continue to morph as diversely as the form of neoliberalism with which it is interconnected. Thus, the difficult task for criminologists is to begin crafting blueprints for how Smartness can be mobilized to better address the production of safety and security of those other publics, but also better recognize and confront the complex weaves of oppression they have endured historically, and continue to experience socially. These are the publics who have been deliberately and mistakenly excluded from the ‘Whitening vision’ of the Smart City presented above, and who—as a consequence—become the targets of its disciplinary and punitive surveillant gaze as a result of how their bodies and actions are codified as unproductive and unbelonging, as incapable of being rendered into the types of value sought by system architects. The critical question (and challenge), therefore, is: how can Smart Cities not merely manifest as socio-technical apparatuses that reproduce and reify inequality and power relations? In other words, how can Smart Cities materialize as liberating structures and forces for the social good, especially incorporating the voices and serving the interests of diverse, marginalized and demonized social groups who, as we have seen, are distanced from the diagrams and infrastructures which produce them?