Making Crime Visible in the Digital Age: The Ethnomethods of Data Policing

Abstract

As digitalization advances, police officers can rely on data traces to expand their capacity to infer suspicion. Despite reasonably warning about the potentially intrusive and prejudicial character of data-driven policing techniques, criminal justice scholars have yet to engage with the epistemological bases by which officers make deductions from data, including concerning legal admissibility. This article proposes that examining data policing using thick descriptive accounts of lived police work provides insights into police officers’ judgments of what constitutes “reasonably objective” crime analysis. Drawing from ethnomethodology’s contributions to police work and technological practices, I examine how the symbolic processes by which officers highlight criminologically relevant phenomena from seemingly decontextualized data points reproduce and reshape long-established methodical police work.