Introduction to Volume I: Algorithmic Governance, Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era

This chapter situates the first volume of Policing and Intelligence in the Global Big Data Era into the larger context of academic literature that has emerged in this field and beyond, in particular linking concepts such as ‘abstract policing’ (Terpstra et al., 2019; Terpstra et al., 2022; Verhage et al., 2022), ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Fyfe et al., 2018; Ratcliffe, 2016), or ‘pre-crime’ (Arrigo & Sellers, 2021; Kuldova, 2022; McCulloch & Wilson, 2016) with notions of ‘algorithmic governance’ (Kalpokas, 2019; Katzenbach & Ulbricht,  2019), ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019), and ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Braithwaite, 2008; Levi-Faur, 2017). Moreover, as we show, across the volume we interrogate these concepts and the realities on the ground within the context of the pluralization and privatization of policing (Boels & Verhage, 2015; O’Reilly, 2015) and the proliferation of new intelligence actors (Ben Jaffel & Larsson, 2022; Ben Jaffel & Larsson, 2023), paying attention to the ways in which the increasing role of intelligence in shaping contemporary cultures of policing both within and beyond the police. This introductory chapter offers the readers multiple possible entry points into reading and thinking through this volume and briefly discussing the various points of intersection between the chapters in this volume, encouraging a transversal reading.