Data-driven policing claims to be the neutral “evidence-based” remedy to policing's ongoing global crisis of legitimacy. This paper recasts the evolving techno-organizational formats of policing as neoliberal folklore, using the framework “folklore of optimization's operational banality” (FOOB) to explicate the brutal banality and operational power of organizational optimization. FOOB points to the moral imperative to optimize remaining operational (rather than truthful/accurate/effective) that underlies US policing's spatially-deterministic technocratic drive. Applying this methodological-conceptual intervention, the article brings together Broken Windows, CompStat, and “Common Operational Picture” (COP) in a US-based genealogy of “COPtimization” across managerial and territorial registers, from crime hot spots to PredPol prediction boxes. The paper then offers a case study of gunshot detection system ShotSpotter and the way environmental sensors automate and scale police command-and-control to the level of weaponized urban infrastructure. I argue ambient policing senses (extracts) and territorializes (pathologizes) problems in space for police intervention; the always-on surveillant platform triggers enforcement, further ontologizing spatial inequality and circumventing police reflexivity. In response to this mounting automation and platform logic of policing's techno-organization, the conclusion discusses counter-mapping practices that generate oppositional operational folklore, rejecting the technofetishistic imaginary of real-time police action and redefining problems and coding operations of/for social justice.
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