States of surveillance. Ethnographic perspectives on technology in policing

Data generated by surveillance technologies is increasingly shaping how states govern. Automated decision-making systems promise to infuse a new "rationality" into the existing bureaucracies of criminal justice systems. This has caused general concern around the unintended consequences and possible harms and inequalities that may result from, or become entrenched with, the introduction of these systems. These technologies usher in changing configurations of power shaped by a multiplicity of agents in this field, including those who govern, but also business interests, bureaucrats, and those who seek to escape the ways these systems are designed to shape their lives. We invite ethnographers to re-politicise what is hidden behind the "mechanical objectivity" of algorithms by tracing power empirically: identifying addresses for resistance to possible harms of surveillant assemblages, and unpacking the black boxes of technologies to show the political decisions that were part and parcel of their making. A central lesson from the works collected in this volume is that there is no one way to engage with this globally entangled, fast-paced area of social change - a diversity of approaches to research on this subject is necessary. We need approaches that take apart the "small" politics of the different actors involved in making a technology work, as much as investigations into the "large" political transformations that come with the introduction of new surveillance tools.