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Security as Socio‐Technical Practice: Predictive Policing and (Non‐)Automation
Author(s) -
Leese Matthias
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
swiss political science review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.632
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1662-6370
pISSN - 1424-7755
DOI - 10.1111/spsr.12432
Subject(s) - sociotechnical system , law enforcement , automation , sociology , order (exchange) , work (physics) , enforcement , predictive analytics , criminology , knowledge management , law , political science , computer science , business , data science , engineering , mechanical engineering , finance
Predictive policing is among the most prevalent new technological tools for law enforcement. Understanding how the police produce knowledge about crime and society in technologically mediated ways is important vis‐a‐vis practices of social ordering. In this paper, I suggest to draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the impact of technology not as analytically isolated artefact, but as embedded in socio‐technical relations that define how it comes to matter in everyday practice. In order to demonstrate what it means to think about technology in socio‐technical terms, I engage the discrepancy between the technical capacities of predictive policing applications and the ways in which they actually become part of police work on a daily basis. Specifically, I investigate how claims about the automation of crime analysis in predictive policing are reconfigured through the interplay of social and technical elements in police work.