Policing as Digital Platform

Abstract

Much of the discussion about platforms and “platform capitalism” centers on commercial platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Shoshana Zuboff’s (2015) analysis of “surveillance capitalism” similarly focuses on Google as the trailblazer pushing the new logic of accumulation that is focused on data extraction and analysis of human activities. In his typology of platform companies, Nick Srnicek (2017) includes less visible industrial platforms that situate themselves as intermediaries between companies rather than between companies and consumer-users. In this article, the focus is a platform-building effort that looks something like an industrial platform but differs in the sense that the company in question, Axon Enterprise, aims to situate itself as an intermediary within and among law enforcement agencies (non-market entities) as a means of building a large-scale data-extractive system of monetization. Axon’s business strategy is emblematic of the ways that police evidence and record-keeping systems are being reimagined, and to some extent reconfigured, as sources of data extraction and analytics on the model of the platform. Whether Axon succeeds or is eclipsed by a competitor like Palantir or even Amazon or Microsoft, the process of reimagining and reorganizing policing as a platform is underway—a process that, to paraphrase Zuboff, deeply imbricates public and private surveillance activities, dissolving the boundary between public and private authority in the surveillance project.