Policing and Anticipatory Transparency: On Digital Transformations, Proactive Governance and Logics of Temporality

This chapter explores how transparency and surveillance practices intersect with the emergence of proactive forms of governance. Driven by digital transformations, we see the emergence of novel organizational practices—and scholarly discussions—of predictive policing that require our attention. What we suggest is that rather than a clear-cut shift from reactive to proactive forms of governance, digital transformations and data analytics create particular conditions for knowledge production, introduce new logics of temporality, and raise important questions about authority and legitimacy. The chapter contributes to discussions about transparency and governance by highlighting how processes of pluralization, privatization and technologization make up an amorphous assemblage of ideational, material, institutional, professional and ethical forces shape logics of temporality and organizing in police work.