Predictive Policing from the Colonies to the Contemporary

Written by Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper. The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own and not necessarily those of Amnesty International UK.

Modern British policing does not simply emerge in 1829, out of the failures of the nightwatchmen or the reactionary and violent nature of the yeomanry, militia or military forces. Rather, British policing gradually unfolds across both the British mainland and it’s colonies over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the principal logics behind formalising police work, is the requirement for uniformed patrols that not only respond to crime and disorder, but prevent it. This ambition for a force which is preventative required officers to surveil specific areas, monitor certain types of people and draw suspicion from particular activities. Thus, as Patrick Williams states in Amnesty International’s Automated Racism report, modern policing has always been predictive.

A history of British policing generally, and predictive policing specifically, in it’s colonial context, is not just empirically useful – it is also crucial for understanding how police forces rationalised their predictions. Specifically, the racial hierarchies and stereotypes that shaped colonial governance informed what kind of data was considered relevant for formulating a prediction, and how that data should be interpreted by the authorities.

Forecasting crime and disorder became most proscriptive during periods of anti-colonial resistance, as the British administration struggled to determine the location and form of an attack or rebellion. Colonial police officers and administrators like Robert Thompson and Frank Kitson developed a set of guidelines for policing insurgencies. First, a suspect community is identified – this is the section of the population from which the perceived criminals or dissidents emerge. In Kenya, it was the Kikuyu ethnic group, in Malaya it was the Chinese Malay whereas in the north of Ireland it was the Catholics.

Second, a regime of surveillance and monitoring was instigated, this could involve stops, searches and road checkpoints. It could also include the monitoring of mail and other forms of communication. If these forms of surveillance did not prove preventative, then forms of collective punishment of the suspect community were established. In Malaya, what the British called ‘New Villages’ were set up, in which large numbers of Chinese Malay were surrounded in barbed wire fences, watch towers and armed patrols. In Kenya, thousands of Kukuyu were interned into labour camps in which torture and killings were widespread. In Ireland, indefinite detention of suspected republicans became routine.

These forms of colonial policing were far more violent and repressive than those employed on the British mainland. Justifying this use of force required two interconnected explanations. The first, was the argument that the threat of crime, violence and disorder was far more dangerous than that of Britain. Secondly, these threats were emerging from a racialised population, whose moral degeneracy justified both the civilising missions of the late colonial period, and the violent policing that marked the tumultuous end of Empire. The Chinese Malay were framed as political fanatics – ‘communist terrorists’ was commonly used to label them, alongside ‘bandits’, ‘thugs’, and ‘gangsters’, after the colonial office banned the use of term ‘insurgents’ as it was deemed to afford the Chinese Malay too much political legitimacy.

The Kukuyu in Kenya were pathologized with more animalistic stereotypes, with films at the time portraying the ‘naked terror’ of ‘savage blood drinking rituals’ in the ‘steaming jungles of Africa’. Again, these stereotypes rationalised the system of apartheid imposed by the British in colonial Kenya, and were built upon to justify violent policing as Britain struggle to keep hold of its colonial possessions. Frank Kitson, a senior officer in the British operations in Kenya, was later drafted into the North of Ireland, to assist with repressing the Republican movement for a united Ireland. While stereotypes about the Irish being essentially violent and disorderly, provided, in a similar way to the Malayan and Kenyan cases, a justification for pre-emptive police violence, it’s proximity to the British mainland also enabled the development of models which could be more readily incorporated into policing back home.

While Frank Kitson was engaged in maintain order in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, policing on the British mainland was also taking a new turn in the use of pre-emptive measures. The use of the ‘sus’ laws, powers enabling police to search and arrest people based purely on ‘suspicion’ rather than evidence, was being used in cities across England. Fear over an unprecedented crisis of law and order had justified the use of this controversial power, with the expressed intention of deterring acts of street robbery termed ‘mugging’.

This new category of crime, borrowed of the US, created the impression that a distinctly new, and different problem of law and order had arisen in Britain – and thus could be attributed to a new and different people. It was young Black men for whom this particular kind of crime became associated, with Black people being the ‘suspect community’ in the application of the ‘sus’ laws. As in the colonies, the predictive policing of ‘sus’ was partly based on police data informing officers where threats of crime were most likely to take place. But racism also played a crucial role in justifying this approach to policing, with stereotypes about Caribbean culture and its propensity for criminality, drug use and harbouring the workshy adding further weight.

‘Sus’ laws were disproportionately used in urban areas with large Black populations, who were surveilled and harassed by the stops, searches, questioning and arrests which proliferated as a result. Pre-emptive arrests in the 1970s/'80s, made with no evidence but merely suspicion that a crime might take place, effectively criminalised those who had previously not committed