Abstract
Drawing primarily on ethnographic research performed in a city in Romania, this paper provides a thick description of police practices and information systems in that municipality. It shows various ways in which technologies mediate policing practitioners’ perceptions, decisions and actions. Bringing some additional material from a case in the Dutch police in which they build risk profiles predicated on real-time data from a sensor network, the paper highlights new phenomena with ethical implications emerging at the intersection of information infrastructures and policing practices. In particular, it shows a solidifying effect of technologically mediated suspicion, a sedimentation process in technological infrastructures and the formation of pockets of prejudice in the layers of software code. To adequately account for these phenomena and others, the paper provides a set of arguments and conditions for a sedimentology of infrastructures. At the same time, it offers the first steps in a larger research project that would adapt and test the limits of a geological vocabulary and approach to understand smart urban environments.
Highlights
Drawing primarily on ethnographic research performed in a city in Romania, this paper provides a thick description of police practices and information systems in that municipality
Bringing some additional material from a case in the Dutch police in which they build risk profiles predicated on real-time data from a sensor network, the paper highlights new phenomena with ethical implications emerging at the intersection of information infrastructures and policing practices
Information infrastructures are becoming pervasive in urban environments—more so in some than in others—and are at the same time increasingly relied upon in policing practices
Summary
Information infrastructures are becoming pervasive in urban environments—more so in some than in others—and are at the same time increasingly relied upon in policing practices. These included day shifts and night shifts in the control room, street patrolling with field agents, data introduction sessions with office personnel and participating in strategy meetings where police management made decisions based on GIS-generated maps represented on big screens In addition to these observations, the analysis draws from internal police documents and system requirement documents that were made available to me by the local police management. In the following two sections, I draw on mediation theories (Akrich and Latour 1992; Latour 1994; Verbeek 2011) and analyse how the system mediates the officers’ perceptions of crime phenomena in the city as well as the potential consequences of this mediation when infrastructures accumulate sediments of prejudice Drawing on these examples—and strengthening them with some additional material in another police force—I make an argument for a larger research project towards a sedimentology of information infrastructures
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