‘Smart’ crime prevention? Digitization and racialized crime control in a Smart City
| Author | Gavin JD Smith,Pat O’Malley |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620972703 |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620972703
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620972703
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‘Smart’ crime prevention?
Digitization and racialized
crime control in a Smart City
Pat O’Malley and Gavin JD Smith
Australian National University, School of Sociology, Australia
Abstract
As part of the global Smart Cities movement, the Switching on Darwin programme
foregrounds digitally enhanced government and urbanism. While promoting its
environmental and democratizing potential, software-enhanced CCTV, LED lighting and
geofencing were among the first components rolled out. In practice, these technologies
will impact adversely on Aboriginal people, already disproportionately targeted by
criminal justice processes. By integrating multiple ‘smart’ technologies with ‘public
safety’ agendas, such Smart City developments provide the potential for intensified
criminalization of visible minorities.
Keywords
Data politics, governance, Indigenous justice, public safety, public space, racialization,
Smart City, social marginality, surveillance, urban social control
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—prom-
ises 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 govern-
ment responsiveness through social media; and improved business efficiency through the
Corresponding author:
Gavin JD Smith, Australian National University, School of Sociology, RSSS Building, Canberra, Australian
Capital Territory 2601, Australia.
Email: gavin.smith@anu.edu.au
972703TCR0010.1177/1362480620972703Theoretical CriminologyO’Malley and Smith
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(1) 40–56
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:
track citizens and their activities through a multitude of different, physically and
socially diffuse, sensors—Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs),
CCTV, Smartphones and so on—in order to improve services and enhance
markets;
reconfigure the built environment in accordance with big data derived from such
sources as the mass tracking of vehicular traffic, pedestrian movements, service
demands and public safety risks;
provide environmental and sustainability benefits through the deployment of
smart sensors and sensing infrastructures, such as digitally controlled street light-
ing and remote local weather monitors;
improve public safety by controlling access to virtual and physical spaces remotely
through ‘geofencing’ software and access cards;
restructure industry and government around ‘the Internet of Things’.1
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 con-
tributions 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, imagina-
tion 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 sec-
tor involvement (e.g. Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019b; Iveson, 2011; Lee et al., 2020; Marvin
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O’Malley and Smith
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