Predictive policing covers algorithmic systems "designed to 'predict' behavioral patterns and traits," which "analyze video feeds, location history, communications metadata, and other information to assign risk scores or forecast future actions" and "serve to justify the intervention of law enforcement authorities and security forces to 'anticipate' illicit behaviors" (No Fair Play: Mapping the 2026 World Cup Surveillance Stack (Ranking Digital Rights, July 2026)).
The stated harms
Two are commonly identified. The first is amplification: these systems "are trained with historically biased datasets and risk amplifying bias," so a model learns from enforcement records that reflect where police have previously concentrated rather than where offences have occurred, and directs further attention there. The second concerns process rather than accuracy — Ranking Digital Rights argues that "data extraction schemes and 'likelihood scores' violate the right to a fair trial and privacy," because a score generated before any offence attaches consequences to a prediction that the subject cannot contest.
Position in the surveillance stack
Ranking Digital Rights places predictive policing as one of five layers in its mapping of the 2026 World Cup deployment, between data harvesting at scale and communications interception. The layering matters analytically: predictive systems consume the output of the harvesting layer and feed the data-integration and command-centre layer, so their inputs and their consequences are both determined by adjacent systems rather than by the predictive model itself.
The integration layer is where the report locates the qualitative change, since merging feeds "eliminat[es] the fragmented safeguards that existed while the systems remained separate" and "may also create permanence: data that might have been deleted in individual systems persists indefinitely in integrated databases." A risk score derived from one jurisdiction's data can therefore follow a person into another's.
Regulatory position
The EU AI Act prohibits individual predictive-policing systems that assess the risk of a person committing a criminal offence based solely on profiling or personality traits, among its prohibited practices. US regulation is largely municipal, which is what allows event-driven procurement to expand deployment without a general legislative decision — the mechanism Ranking Digital Rights traces through South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014–16, Qatar 2022 and Paris 2024.