Future Crime Will Emerge From Technologies We Cannot Yet Imagine

This episode steps back from historical analysis to ask what patterns across centuries of urban crime reveal about the future. We examine how new technologies create new opportunities for crime, how criminal organizations adapt faster than law enforcement, and how the relationship between urbanization and crime has remained constant even as the forms of crime have changed. We trace predictions made by criminologists and futurists about emerging forms of crime—from AI-enabled fraud to bioterrorism to crimes we don't yet have names for. Using historical analysis, technological research, and expert interviews, we explore whether understanding the past can help us anticipate the future, or whether crime will always outpace our ability to predict it. This episode asks what the history of urban crime teaches us about the cities we're building now.