Introduction to Volume II: Interrogating Cultures of Policing and Intelligence in the Big Data Era

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence combined with the increasing role of private security, tech, and consulting companies, are reshaping contemporary policing and the ways in which we ensure security, enforce law, and prevent and investigate crime. This chapter introduces the volume II which zooms in on the epistemologies of data in algorithmic governance, setting the stage for the discussions across this volume, in which we interrogate the various roles, quality of, and assumptions behind data collection and how data has become an instrument in governance, management, and decision-making. Data is used for the purposes of both public and private surveillance and governance and critical attention therefore needs to be paid to how gathering, sharing, and reuse of data is both political and culturally constructed in a global context. We also need to account for the ways in which it affects knowledge production in non-transparent ways and for the human and social consequences of this development. This chapter prepares the ground for the discussions across this second volume where we delve into the imaginaries of accuracy, clean versus dirty data in South Africa, discussions about facial recognition and technopolitics in Brazil, the construction of intelligence and organisational learning in Norwegian police, data reuse in humanitarian aid and border control, ethics and broader questions of transparency, data quality, and trust in data-driven policing, as well as the very topical issues of policing of generative AI and the ways in which authoritarian and liberal democracies use biopolitics to turn social welfare into surveillance, with examples from India and China.