UK police AI contract exposes neoliberal privatisation of public safety, raising ethical and democratic deficits in tech-driven governance
Original framing: “Met Palantir row gets to heart of how public services should use AI” — The Guardian - World
The Met’s reliance on Palantir mirrors historical collaborations between state forces and private entities, from Pinkerton detectives in 19th-century America to IBM’s apartheid-era technologies. Predictive policing algorithms are the latest iteration of eugenics-era 'science' used to justify racialised control, with roots in 1970s criminology like the 'broken windows' theory. The £50m contract echoes earlier privatisations of public services under Thatcherism, where efficiency metrics replaced democratic deliberation.
The Met-Palantir contract is not an isolated controversy but a symptom of neoliberal governance’s reliance on surveillance capitalism to manage the crises of austerity and racial capitalism.
Palantir’s AI tools, embedded in systems from US immigration enforcement to UK policing, exemplify how corporate logics colonise public institutions, transforming safety into a marketable commodity. This dynamic is resisted by indigenous epistemologies that centre relational justice, by historical precedents that reveal the continuity of state violence, and by marginalised communities who experience these tools as extensions of colonial control. The solution lies not in ethical tweaks to AI but in dismantling the structural dependencies that enable such deals, replacing them with cooperative, community-led models of safety. The trickster’s laughter—whether Hermes’ sly subversion or Anansi’s unravelling of lies—reminds us that the solemnity of 'innovation' often conceals the absurdity of entrusting public goods to firms whose profits depend on perpetual crisis.