Small data, big deal or big data, small deal? Zooming into the practices of digitalised policing

Abstracts

(In)visibility in digital policing: mutable identities in the application of surveillance tools in road traffic control 

Anda Adamsone-Fiskovica, Baltic Studies Centre

The application of digital tools in policing is becoming increasingly widespread, with the domain of road traffic control likewise witnessing an influx of surveillance technologies of both predictive and punitive nature (Bates, Allen, Watson, 2016; Eger, Fortner, Slade, 2017; Gräler et al. 2020; Shaab, 2017; Sieveneck, Suttern, 2021). Building on the idea of visibility as a category with an ambivalent nature and societal effects (Brighenti 2007), we approach the topic of digital surveillance in road traffic through the lens of varying conceptions of visibility and invisibility. Based on the empirical data from a case study of digital traffic control in Latvia, with a focus on the use of speed cameras and mobile applications, we identify and explore four groups of research objects that can be analysed in terms of (in)visibility: (1) surveillance tools, (2) surveillance subjects, (3) surveillance objects, and (4) surveillance data. We argue that while there might seem to be a clear distinction between being visible or invisible in digital policing, there are many in-between states, with the status of and boundary between visibility and invisibility (socially and/or cognitively) of the same object being blurred and changing under different conditions. We discuss the implications of these mutable identities of road traffic surveillance objects and subjects for shaping power relations between watchers and watched in IT-enabled monitoring (Zorina, Belanger, Clegg, 2021) that demonstrate qualities of both disempowerment and empowerment of road traffic participants. 

The digitalised police gaze 

Jenny Maria Lundgaard, The Norwegian Police University College 

This paper will scrutinise what happens to the police gaze when the police use drones for observation, exploring how digital tools influence decision-making in practice.  

In operative policing, the police gaze plays a crucial part. By observing and interpreting their surroundings, officers sort and assess when to intervene and take action, and this gaze can be simultaneously effective and problematic (Finstad, 2000). Within police practices, having “eyes on site”, provides authoritative information and the visual perceptions of events and sites is deemed the highest form of knowledge about ongoing incidents (Lundgaard, 2021). 

n this paper I ask what happens to the police gaze and police practices when drones are used for such information-gathering – what does it mean to see through a technology? Based on insights from participant observation during the Norwegian Police Service’s one year drone trial, I study how technologies shape visual interpretations and professional practices. This paper will explore what can seem like a paradox: When drones provided a visual communication platform for the police, facilitating the sharing of live images during ongoing events, it became pertinent for the police to develop better tools for oral communication. This reveals how the interpretation of images is a highly subjective matter, and that sharing images does not mean sharing a gaze. 

Longing and Lacking: Future, past and present expectations on and in municipal crime prevention technology 

Katarina Winter, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University

The recent years have witnessed a huge rise in new crime prevention and prediction technologies. While there is an overall lack of studies of such technologies and their societal consequences, previous studies have mainly engaged with predictive policing technologies. But similar technologies are also spreading into local crime preventive work in regions, municipalities, housing companies, etc. Various types of systems, apps, and sensors are purchased to provide efficient crime prevention, reduce crime rates and related costs, strengthen citizen dialogue, and to increase knowledge and collaboration between relevant actors. Such initiatives also bring tension, for example between different prioritizations (economic, political), between different types of (fear of) crime that can or cannot be targeted, as well as between new and old actors (experts, private actors, public officials, citizens) and (knowledge) objects (existing and new systems). The current project aims to explore such tensions through studying the establishment of a digital system for municipal crime prevention in Sweden. Empirically, the material consists of interviews with municipal actors who are responsible for the implementation of new crime prevention technologies, as well as observations and documents related to such practices. Theoretically, the project combines translation and reception studies to analyze past, present, and future expectations and implications for knowledge that new crime prevention technologies presuppose and bring. 

Anticipating crime: dataification, standardization and visibility 

Helene Gundhus, University of Oslo

In Norway, intelligence-led policing and risk assessment tools are implemented to prevent crime. The Police Intelligence Doctrine (2014) positions data-driven intelligence as a key element of knowledge-based management and practice. The doctrine constitutes a management concept that organize how the police shall act and be. It represents a new ‘epistemic power’ in the police organization and the society (Archer et. al. 2020). The hyper-visibility afforded by digital architectures (Flyverbom 2022) contributes with sociotechnical images and practices translated and domesticated in a police organization.  

There is a lack of empirical research examining how police officers are using data driven technologies and how their varied usage affects not only approaches to potential criminals and crime prevention but also the technologies themselves. We will particularly explore the drift towards the increased recording, standardization and data integration that intelligence-led policing requires. This is prominent on different scales, from the data systems and formats, made by global firms, to the actual co-production of the outcome by the technology and users. Drawing on interviews and observations, the paper aims not only to focusing on the role of digital data and software in the creation of potential criminals and crime, but exploring the co-construction as a process that involves both kinds of actors: human ones, such as programmers, end users and experts, as well as non-humans.  The paper contributes to a discussion on how does the datafication of the future change present policies, collective practices of imagining, planning, and controlling future(s). 

Digitalizing Police Science: The Case of the Danish POL-INTEL

Björn Karlsson, IT University of Copenhagen

 How should we keep modern, digital society safe and secure? For the Danish government and its police, echoing a worldwide trend, the answer is through the development of scientific police analysis. The means to accomplish this was through purchasing the POL-INTEL platform from Palantir Technologies to give Danish police the ability to analyze vast quantities of data. But what politics, practices and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2013) underlie this idea of a neutral, objective police science?  

As Foucault (2009) describes the project of policing was historically intertwined with the creation of a police science, polizeiwissenschaft, in order to structure, order and analyze the world. This presentation connects this historical genealogy of polizeiwissenschaft into modern forms of digitalized, data-driven scientific analysis of the police. 

It does so by tracing the translation (Callon, 1984) of theories and concepts from international academia and think tanks into the Danish police by way of conferences, handbooks and training, and subsequently into police practice by police intelligence workers, management and patrols. so doing this empirical investigation highlights the contingencies, conflicts, failures, hopes and frictions in the theory and practice of a modern, digitalized polizeiwissenschaft through data-driven platforms such as POL-INTEL.  

References:  
Callon, M. (1984) ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, The sociological review, 32(1_suppl), pp. 196–233. 
Foucault, M. (2009) Security, Territory, Population. Edited by M. Senellart, F. Ewald, and A. Fontana. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245075. 
Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H. (2013) ‘Sociotechnical imaginaries and national energy policies’, Science as culture, 22(2), pp. 189–196. 

What is the problem with predictive policing? 

Emils Kilis, Baltic Studies Centre 

Predictive policing has given rise to a multitude of concerns voiced by a variety of different actors, reflecting a growing interest in the proliferation of entanglements between policing and digital tools. However, in practice one must contend with contrasting and sometimes even discrepant understandings of predictive policing that are articulated in different contexts. Unsurprisingly, this has meant that the concerns and critiques voiced by researchers and stakeholders are frequently tied to specific instances of predictive policing that vary in terms of their application, scale and sophistication. What is more, the objections and anxieties expressed by the actors involved generally refer to contextual specificities and the controversial aspects of the particular tool at the disposal of law enforcement agencies. This plurality of views is further reflected in the different varieties of critique that can be identified in academic discourse, suggesting that the “problem” with predictive policing is itself an ambiguous and contested issue. Drawing on a Foucauldian genealogical approach, we engage with these different understandings and critiques of predictive policing as a series of contingent developments that endeavour to produce “knowledge and truth” about and articulate the “problem” with predictive policing. Based on an exploratory literature review of the most-cited articles in the Scopus database, we conclude that several ideal types of critique can be identified in the literature, each of which focuses on its own issues and suggests a different form of critical engagement with predictive policing.