‘Catching’ and ‘Targeting’: Risk‐Based Policing, Local Culture and Gendered Practices

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore cultural and practical aspects of the growing use of information and communication technology (ICT) in policing. By using empirical research on policing in Norway, the focus will be on how ICT is used as a crime prevention instrument in everyday police work and culture. The transition, which the new technologies mediate, will be explored by focusing on concepts of risk and materialization of risk‐based policing at the practice level in two cases: 1) a special unit fighting serious and organized crime utilizing proactive policing methods, police informers, crime profiling and databases, and 2) a police station focusing on low‐level crime by using a problem‐oriented policing model, transmitting responsibility for personal security onto identified ‘problem‐owners’.1 Based on an examination of risk phenomena as contextual, embedded in practice and cultural settings, various stories about risk management will be told. The stories reflect different control strategies in the crime control discourses, and point to how risk‐based technologies are shaped and adapted in occupational culture and practice. The article illuminates the importance of studying the empirical complexity ICT is used in, and looks towards, to paraphrase O'Malley and Palmer (1996), ‘firewalls of resistance’ in the local occupational culture, that are preventing full integration of risk tools.

Keywords:

• Crime prevention
• Gender and policing
• Information and communication technology
• Intelligence‐led policing
• Professional judgment
• Risk‐based policing
• Targeted or problem‐oriented policing (POP)

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Katja Franko Aas, Magnus Hörnquist, Thomas Mathiesen, Heidi Mork Lomell for useful comments on the article. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive suggestions, and the editor of Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention. I would also like to thank participants at the ‘Crime control, risk and technology’ conference at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law in Oslo, for widening my approach and enriching working with my thesis.

Notes

Grand theorizing of risk society has relevance within criminology the last 20 years, and risk theorization has been applied to issues of social control and social regulation (Kemshall 2003; O'Malley 2004). For example Rose (1996a, 1996b, 1999, 2000) has argued that one central feature with advanced liberal societies is the technique of governing at a distance through subtle and dispersed risk‐based techniques and technologies.

‘Problem‐owner’ is a notion used by the police in the two cases. It is referring to the POP‐model, and whom they identify as important to participate in the risk‐management. According to Wright (2002: 121): “Partnership refers to a purposeful relationship between the police and the public or between the police and other agencies in the field.”

To throw light upon discourses in crime control, Johnston and Shearing (2003: 129) point out that risk‐based policing is using instrumental techniques, and is focusing on minimization of crime and risks, rather than normalization of deviance, penalization or reparation of the conflicts. But these four mentalities are not mutually exclusive, they are combined and recombined.

An illustration of the early risk thinking in policing is Patrick Colquhoun's model of preventive form of policing from the late eighteenth century (Garland 2001: 31). Christian Borch (2005) also points to a continuity of an anticipatory crime control since the beginning of the lombrosian project in the second half of the eighteenth century, which emphasizes unveiling of risk factors to optimize regulation of crime in order to protect society from risk.

This can also mean that Ericson and Haggerty (1997) overstate their empirical data about trends towards risk‐oriented policing. As Herbert (2000: 117–118) puts it in an interesting review essay: ‘But one wonders whether they often overstate their argument and whether they fully investigate the points of tension within this transformation. They at times seem to be of two minds about the move toward risk communications. On the one hand, they regularly suggest that police officer discretion is taking a back seat to risk communication formats (…). At other points, however, they discuss officers who regularly ignore all the necessary forms or who simply ignore their computers and their concomitant requirements. This suggests both that their claims are necessarily more temperate than they sometimes indicate (…).’

A term borrowed from Johnston and Shearing (2003: 28).

See also Finstad (1998, 2000) for the same findings.

See Mats Alvesson (2004: 41–69) for a discussion of ‘knowledge’ as a concept, and different understandings of the word.

See also Garland (2001) and O'Malley (2000, 2001) for the same argument.