Techno-digital policing: Time, temporalities, timescapes

Abstract

This paper is about policing and time. Time matters, especially when strategic investments in technological and digital innovations prioritise and valorise the speed and instantaneity of real-time automation. Techno-digital policing recalibrates the temporal dynamics of everyday policework, and opens up an interesting conceptual space at the intersections of criminological research, policing studies, and the sociology of time. How should we account for time in our theorisations of policing and securitisation; how do we understand time – as schedule, cycle, chronology, speed, dis/continuity, or a succession of moments; how far, and in what ways, does a temporal analytic advance our understanding of techno-digital policing? To respond to these questions, the paper makes use of Barbara Adam's timescapes perspective to critically explore the multi-dimensional and intersecting contours of time which permeate the techno-digital policing environment.