Technologies of Policing; Policing as Technology – II

Abstract

Policing has always relied on technologies to assist in the spatial management and social control of populations. Recently, digital technologies have become increasingly central to police operations, which parallels a shift to more proactive forms of policing. Predictive policing, online surveillance, biometrics, facial recognition, machine learning, body cameras, gunshot detection, interoperable databases, and drones connect to existing police technologies as many departments attempt to shift to ‘intelligence-led’ or ‘data-driven’ approaches. With the current public crisis facing policing, there has been a growing questioning of the effects of technologies, computation, and data on practices of policing. How can STS approaches contribute to studying policing in its situated contexts, considering the uneven and often fraught implementation of technology? Given how little we know about what technologies of policing, or even policing as a technology itself can do, we invite perspectives and approaches that study the material impacts of policing. In this panel, we seek to include a diverse set of concerns and methods in order to reveal new depths and breadth to our understanding of how technologies of policing and policing as technology function and transform each other. These might include theoretical, methodological, or empirical contributions that, for example, historicize policing technologies (Jefferson, 2020); engage ethnographically with police officers, departments, or technology developers (Brayne, 2017); experiment with policing algorithms (Lum & Isaac, 2016); and more. Further, given the disproportionate use of violence against marginalized members of our communities, we encourage approaches that consider how to center resistive and abolitionist approaches in studying policing.

Nick Lally (University of Kentucky)
Xerxes Minocher (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Chair

• Xerxes Minocher, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Ethnographies of Police Power in the Cyber Ecosystem - Andrea Miller, Florida Atlantic University

• Big Data policing in Denmark: The case of Pol-Intel - Vasilis Vlassis, IT University of Copenhagen

• Algorithmic Policing: An Empirical Study of the Algorithmically Mediated Construction of Individual Risk in a UK Police Force - Daniel Marciniak, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

• The influence of infrastructure on Turkish-Kurdish ethnic conflict - Ibrahim Isik, The University of Arizona

Session Organizer

• Nick Lally, University of Kentucky