Data-led and Digital Policing: A Global Perspective

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together ongoing ethnographic research on digital policing in Brazil, Norway, India, South Africa, and Germany, as part of the ‘Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing’ (AGOPOL) Project funded by the Norwegian Research Council and Oslo Metropolitan University.

The pandemic has provided an excuse for governments to use pervasive technologies for maintaining law and order and security for its people - reinforcing police (surveillance and digitalisation) trends of the pre-pandemic period. This panel aims to look at security practices of Brazil, South Africa, India, Europe, to understand how policing has become a melange of apps, social media, and digital technologies and data analytics that work to provide the semblance of round the clock security to people. With large amounts of information that the policing agents have access to today, policing is not just a post facto job anymore, but a constant search for the deviant, the troublemaker, the other. At the same time with social media interactions, policing and surveillance is constantly performed as moral work. These have important repercussions on privacy, liberty and freedom of speech and expression of the people.

This panel aims to discuss broadly the technologies that have become ubiquitous with the institution of policing across the world, i.a. legitimised by the pandemic, that claim to be more effective, efficient, objective and neutral but in reality end up perpetuating ways of traditional policing, though with the added stamp of approval from technology. From predictive policing in Germany, quest for more AI tech in South Africa, use of digital litter in European border control, to the use of social media by the special forces in Brazil and the lateral use of data collected by resident welfare associations for surveillance and control, this panel will show that digitalisation and datafication are increasingly defining everyday policing.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Policing and Law enforcement

Chairs

• Tessa Diphoorn, Utrecht University

• Shivangi Narayan, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Individual Presentations

• MyGate: Convenience or pervasive surveillance? A study of the app usage in a gated community in NCR' - Shivangi Narayan, Jawaharlal Nehru University

• “We’re all dreaming AI”: Speculative Fantasies and Technologies of Desire in South African Policing - Tessa Diphoorn, Utrecht University

• Predictive Policing: On Algorithms and Community Policing - Simon Egbert, Bielefeld University; Elena Esposito, Bielefeld University/University of Bologna

• Guns, Fatigues, and Fitness: Elite Squad Instagramming in Rio de Janeiro’s Everyday War on Crime - Tomas Salem, University of Bergen

• Outsourcing security intelligence: the risks of digital litter in migration control practices - Veronika Nagy, Utrecht University