Mapping City Crime and the New Aesthetic of Danger

This article investigates the recent proliferation of crime-mapping software applications provided by police departments in dozens of US cities. In these maps, urban space is rendered according to prevailing notions of criminality, constructing a landscape of danger that borrows from and contributes to the wider visual culture of crime. In the aesthetic rendering of illegality, place is represented with the aim of revealing information with a social purpose, and in so doing it re-imagines real space according to dominant values about the nature of crime, criminals, and urban space. While the adoption of such mapping programs is justified using the rhetoric of community empowerment, their design supports a neo-liberal agenda of individual responsibility over safety in the context of outsourced security.