Behind the Allure of Accuracy: The Imperial Making of Broken Windows Policing in Santiago, Chile

In 2011, the Chilean national police transitioned from reactive crime control to evidence-based policing. Supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and Altegrity Risk International, a global consulting company led by former chiefs of the New York Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department, the government created the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD). Inspired by the NYPD’s ‘broken windows” policing, STAD was a data-driven policing program that deploys predictive algorithms, spatial data systems, and network models to forecast where crime is likely to occur and who is probably involved. In this dissertation, I ask, (1) What explains this shift to predictive crime control if previous policies were already working? (2) Was STAD simply the result of a North-South policy transfer and the US’ power penetration in Chile? (3) How has STAD transformed policing practices on the ground and led to new forms of regulation of the urban poor? Drawing on ethnographic observations within the national police, 68 in-depth interviews, and 2,000 pages of archival materials, I suggest that STAD was not simply a unidirectional imperial imposition of US broken windows policing nor a purely domestic innovation in crime control. Instead, I argue that STAD was the result of imperial negotiations where the “private agents of US empire” (private consultants), “imperial bureaucrats” (Chilean politicians), and “data-makers” (police officers in territories of urban relegation) coproduced, at different scales, a new approach to control the urban poor.