Joseph Young

JOSEPH LEE YOUNG, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded a grant in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Peopling the ‘Risk Terrain’: The Techno-politics of Predictive Policing in Atlantic City, NJ,’ supervised by Dr. Adriana Petryna. This study on the implementation of a predictive policing technology by the Atlantic City Police Department, Atlantic City, New Jersey, involved eighteen months of ethnographic research, primarily among with police personnel in various settings’ride-alongs with patrol officers; strategic planning and community stake-holder meetings; a state-of-the-art surveillance center; public relations and community outreach events’as well as with representatives from various public agencies and NGOS, business leaders and urban redevelopers, civic organizations, and residents. This research traces the relations between the ongoing production of geographic heterogeneity, racialization, and capital value creation, and seeks to elucidate how the police both mediate and generate these relations. In doing so, this project poses novel questions concerning value creation, racial differentiation and policing under contemporary configurations of ‘racial capitalism’ in the American city.