My latest article, titled “Adding Government to Proof: Police Reports, the Limits of Standardization, and Data Proliferation in Crime Analysis” has now been published in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. The paper explicates the creative labor required to reconcile incompatible informational logics in contemporary policing. Specifically, I retrace how crime analysts turn narrative, legally oriented police reports into analyzable data despite the limits of standardization. Because reports serve a proof function in the criminal justice system and cannot easily be restructured, analysts have to rely on extensive manual modelling of information requests and emerging natural language processing tools to extract relevant details. Notably, this creates temporary layers of proliferated data that support the government function of analytics without altering the reports themselves.
Technology and Governance
Matthias Leese 