Predictive Punishment: The Detecta and the incorporation of Data Mining and Profiling techniques (Big Data) in the practices of Surveillance of the São Paulo Military Police

Abstract

The studies on Sociology of Punishment concentrates in the comprehension of the historical forms that organized the mechanisms of punishment and administration of the criminality in the most diverse social organizations. However, with the development of new communication and surveillance technologies, moreover these studies begin to interchange with the Surveillance Studies and Social Studies of Science and Technologies to comprehend the new strategies of the public security. In this context, in 2014, the São Paulo state government contracted a system named "Detecta" from Microsoft, which combines the process of surveillance cameras, with criminal and geo-positioning databases. This apparatus inaugurates a new form of governamentality of public security, known as Predictive Policing, characterized by the reliance on algorithms for the construction of profiles and statistics, supposedly capable of anticipating future patterns of behave, and scenarios. Therefore, our purpose in this project is to debate the particularities of this form of governamentality, centered in predictive policing and massive data collection apparatus, in a context of public security deeply marked by arbitrariness, exclusion and discrimination. In this sense, our purpose here is to identify the possible emergency of a new form of governamentality of public security, centered at Detecta in São Paulo.