Negotiating digital traces

The epistemic power of recorded police data

Abstract

Drawing on two empirical cases in different Norwegian police units, we explore how the increasing data gathering, recording, sorting, standardizing, and integration required by the Norwegian police's Intelligence Doctrine is experienced by users. Inspired by domestication theory, we provide new insights into police officers’ varied perceptions, interpretations, and use of data. Our main finding is that digital traces were not necessarily used as the steered and managed intelligence process envisioned in the Intelligence Doctrine, and that this led to various adverse outcomes. Police officers engaged with recorded and digital traces in varied ways—rejecting, resisting, ignoring, supporting, adopting, or negotiating them. The intelligence process was constrained by bias inherent to the system, which resulted from focusing information gathering on what was already available, and from connecting it to recurrent individuals and problems. In the processes of turning analogue objects into digital ones, police officers’ gut feeling and intuition still mattered, for example when information was selected for the crime intelligence system. The way the police related to the epistemic power of the data varied, but officers were obliged to relate to this uncertain element. Despite the
standardized framework for how data should be applied, differences in practical routines, the digital tools used, symbolic work and learning processes revealed that its domestication in the police organization was messy. We found gaps between policy and practice, which can be seen both in unexpected workarounds and in solutions for organizing routines and everyday work. These reciprocal processes influenced and were influenced by police culture. As police intelligence evolves, the interpretation and utilization of recorded data may change, especially with the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence. Future research will show
how police navigate between data-driven and observation-based narratives, and how this affects their social identity within a continuum of “datafied” and “contextual” police culture.