Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa

Both nationally and internationally, we see that the police is embracing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a decision-making tool prevent crime and disorder. The use of digital technology and the growing role of private security companies, technology companies and consulting firms are to changing the police and how we ensure social order and safety, enforce the law and prevent and investigate crime. By bringing together a team of 15 researchers from cultural and area studies, anthropology, criminology, sociology, history, literature and law, we have studied how these fundamental changes affect police cultures. Through qualitative and ethnographic research on policing in Norway, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, we have found that the changes unfold very differently depending on the socio-economic and cultural context within which the changes occur. Our findings show that the cultural circumstances of each location form the conditions for how the new predictive policing tools are taken up. In India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa, technological change appears to be a more important driver of this development compared to Norway, where new management concepts and organization play a dominant role. This disparity may be related to legal conditions and reluctance to change the law, as well as cultural traditions. Despite differences, we find that artificial intelligence, machine learning and data shape policing in all the different cultural, political, legal and economic contexts. Our findings contribute to the understanding and development of concepts such as ‘abstract policing’ (Terpstra et al., 2019; Terpstra et al., 2022; Verhage et al., 2022), ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Fyfe et al., 2018; Ratcliffe, 2016), or ‘pre-crime’ (Arrigo & Sellers, 2021; Kuldova, 2022; McCulloch & Wilson, 2016), ‘algorithmic governance’ (Kalpokas, 2019; Katzenbach & Ulbricht, 2019), ‘surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Braithwaite, 2008; Levi-Faur, 2017). A key finding is that intelligence and digitalization play increasingly important roles in shaping modern police cultures both within and outside the police, where we find increased pluralization and privatization of policing, as well as the proliferation of new intelligence actors. We have published our findings in two substantial volumes, authored by the project participants; Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era. Volume I is comprised of a rich and unique collection of global perspectives on data-driven predictive technologies and the expansion and use of surveillance devices in policing and intelligence, both public and private. Centered around the concept of ‘algorithmic governance’, different practices of abstract and intelligence-led policing are explored within the context of surveillance and regulatory capitalism. Each chapter addresses both the theoretical concepts and how the practice unfolds – from Russia, the USA, India, and Brazil, to Denmark, Germany and Norway. Volume I provide a unique insight into the ways in which technologies and data-driven practices — from facial recognition and predictive algorithms, to generative AI — are reshaping policing cultures both within and outside the police force itself. Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era, Volume II, uses empirical case studies to examine the use of data in policing and delves into the epistemology of data and explores fantasies about how complex problems can be reduced to technical problems with technological solutions. At the same time, questions related to governance, ethics, and knowledge construction are raised. The chapters range from exploring the construction of clean and dirty data in private and public policing in South Africa, discussions of facial recognition and technopolitics in Brazil, the construction of intelligence and organizational learning in Norwegian police ethics and broader questions of transparency, data quality, and trust in data-driven policing, to the highly topical questions of policing by generative AI and the ways in which both authoritarian and liberal democracies, such as China and India, use biopolitics to turn social welfare into surveillance. Overall, intelligence as thinking and idea-logic, together with a more or less holistic digital architecture, can be considered a common “conceptual hub” where the various project results are linked. The connection of thinking/ideas, organization of policing, and digital tools is a common feature across cultures, and provides input to an understanding that makes it more possible for relevant actors to understand and talk about developments. Then it is also more possible to connect to developments and influence them. In this way, the project has resulted in important theoretical and empirical contributions that can benefit academics, politicians, the police and citizens.

The AGOPOL project has disseminated extensively throughout the project period. The key concepts resulting from the project, the ‘compliance-industrial complex’, (Kuldova, 2022), has been pioneering the academic and practical understanding of the linking of compliance to intelligence and data-driven policing. Narayan has contributed with her work on predictive policing in the Indian context, with her book Predictive Policing and The Construction of The ‘Criminal’: An Ethnographic Study of Delhi Police (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) which is absolutely unique in the scholarship on South Asia, building on unique access to New Delhi’s police’s crime mapping unit utilizing predictive technologies. Tomas Salem has written a book titled Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and The Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), which offers an ethnographically grounded perspective on policing in Rio de Janeiro and has launched concepts such as ‘cosmologies of war,’ while exploring the moral universe of policing and the rise of the far-right in Brazil, including the role of digital technologies and social media in these processes. Kjetil Klette Bøhler has developed new concepts of ‘musical policing’, linking policing to both the digital and the musical as well as the political; his work focusing on Brazil is pathbreaking and opening a new field in musical studies; two special issues of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology edited by Bøhler have been dedicated to the subject, in addition to several articles and book chapters. In addition to this, Kuldova, Wathne and Nordrik have edited another special issue of the same journal on Algorithmic governance and social control. Jardar Østbø has published extensively on the Russian intelligence state, most notably in his path-breaking article ‘The Russian hybrid intelligence state: reconceptualizing the politicization of intelligence and the ‘intelligencization’of Politics’ in National Intelligence and Security (2024), launching new perspectives on the Russian state, grounded in a cultural analysis and an understanding of the dynamics of technology. Helene O. I. Gundhus and Christin Thea Wathne have published several book chapters and articles on digitalization and reform in the Norwegian police; one article that can be emphasized here is ‘Resistance to platformization: Palantir in the Norwegian police’ in Information, Communication & Society (2024). The main result, which clearly shows the benefits of collaboration, are the two edited volumes that have resulted from this project: Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era, Volume I: New Global Perspectives on Algorithmic Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, eds. Kuldova, Gundhus & Wathne) and Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era, Volume II: New Global Perspectives on the Politics and Ethics of Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, eds. Kuldova, Gundhus & Wathne). These volumes bring together all the project researchers,

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the technology of the future that will radically transform the world we live in. AI and the growing role of private security, tech and consultancy companies, are reshaping policing and how we ensure social order and security, enforce law, and prevent and investigate crime. However, this ongoing radical transformation of our world is little understood. To change that, AGOPOL brings together a team of 15 established scholars and young talented researchers from cultural and area studies, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and law and based in 9 countries, to develop a ground-breaking comparative cultural analysis of policing as a global digitized and hybrid project. Based on ethnographic research in Norway, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, we will leverage comparative cross-cultural analysis and generate a novel understanding of cultures of policing – both within and beyond the police. We will analyse the impact of algorithmic governance on society and those policed – from the unintended consequences, algorithmic injustices, and harms related to these new modes of policing, to their impact on legitimacy and societal trust. Our analysis will deal with issues such as the underlying cultural conditions shaping the use of AI technologies in policing; the transformation of institutional cultures stemming from the technological change; the transformation of knowledge cultures with the increasing dominance of datafied ‘truth’; the interaction of algorithmic governance and cultures of policing; and, perhaps most importantly, the global cultural transformation as an effect of the intertwined processes of datafication, securitization, and commodification of security. AGOPOL will result in a number of scholarly publications (3 special journal issues, 21 peer-reviewed journal articles, 2 books, 16 book chapters) and events (3 international workshops, 3 international conferences), as well as a website and a series of short movies.