This book is the product of a windfall encounter. Each of us individually would
have probably written a quite different book – or, even more likely, no book
at all. We were lucky enough that our paths crossed at a workshop in Freiburg,
Germany, in March of 2017. At the time, both of us had, independent of each
other, only recently started to engage with predictive policing. The research
outlines that both of us presented at that workshop were remarkably similar,
and as it turned out during a couple of longer follow-up
conversations, we
were in fact interested in almost identical questions surrounding the use of
algorithmic crime analysis software. There was a large overlap in the theoretical
and conceptual literature that we had been reading. And we had at that point
even started to interview some of the same police representatives and software
developers.