The Digital Leviathan: Prediction, Politics and Police Power in POL-INTEL

In this digital era, police forces across the globe are turning to cutting-edge data analytics for the purpose of enacting more efficient police power through predicting and pre-empting crime. In Denmark, allegedly one of the most digitalized countries in the world, the police have turned to the American firm Palantir Technologies to produce a platform named POL-INTEL to integrate, analyze and visualize mass amounts of data from different data bases. For the Danish national police, this platform was heralded as a “super weapon” with predictive policing capacities that would represent a “quantum leap” into the future of law enforcement. For critics, POL-INTEL has been branded a tool of mass surveillance. With this background in mind, this thesis asks two questions: How is police power imagined and enacted in the digital era? And how is governance over the police materialized in relation to data-driven policing?

To answer these questions, this thesis develops a methodological framework that combines ethnographic, historiographic and interventionist approaches. Ethnographically, data is drawn from interviews with police officers as well as a variety of other actors, while following the data of those profiled by the police through the criminal justice system. Furthermore, a variety of documents, ranging from public accounts in the press serving to detail the public debate, to internal police handbooks, state reports, etc. are featured. In terms of theory, this thesis synthesizes concepts from critical theory and Science and Technology Studies in particular, alongside Critical Data Studies, police studies with a particular focus on predictive policing, as well as critical criminology. Together, these produce a useful framework for analyzing the complexities of police power, and the materialization of governance, on multiple different levels.

Specifically, the thesis investigates the history of police power, tracing how police power has been imagined from the 17th century to the modern notion of predictive policing. POL-INTEL constitutes a case of digital police technology that is expected and portrayed as if it brings immense efficiency in producing social order through the application of science and technology. Through this investigation, the thesis historically ties the notion of predictive policing to the state in a way that has generally been obscured in earlier literature. Concretely, the thesis argues that predictive techniques and technologies have been a major element in the enactment of police power throughout history and follows how the specific notion of predictive policing has been revised and demarcated in the modern era, which has created conceptual inflation. In contrast, the notion of “prediction in action” is launched as a way of capturing the variety of ways law enforcement
attempts to predict across different sites and with different technologies.

Moreover, the thesis shows that police power has been imagined through predictive data analytics such as POL-INTEL in ways that conflict with how police power is enacted in practice, where the promised effects and new working methods are rarely fully implemented or successful. Instead, the thesis shows that the ways police power is imagined are ideological and serve to black box the enactment of police power. In turn, this black boxing means that police are able to hide their own biases, practices and politics, as well as
how they influence the state itself by strategically navigating those forms of governance materialized to control law enforcement. This discovery reverses classical philosophical schemas of police as subordinate to the state and underlines instead how police power may influence government institutions and elected politicians.

Details of the complexities, contradictions, and nuances of how police power is enacted in the digital era and how governance over the police is materialized in relation to data-driven policing are also explored. For
instance, this thesis described in depth the internal conflicts and contradictions within the police regarding POL-INTEL as a managerial tool that attempts to curtail, limit or direct police discretion. At the same time,
the thesis underlines how police discretionary power is still a significant factor in Danish law enforcement with racially biased police profiling practices feeding biased data into the platform. By utilizing and developing the concept of feedback loops, a multiplicity of feedback loops are also traced that
quantitatively or qualitatively affect the lives of individuals profiled by the police, while mechanisms such as ghetto classifications and police predictions are fed into governance.

This thesis thereby concretely connects the relation between police and the state in the digital era while also accentuating the contradictions of how police power is imagined and enacted. It specifies and details police predictive practices in action, thereby revealing a process that spans the human, non-human and the imaginary.