Research project Prioritizations and knowledge in digital crime prevention
The project explores new knowledge processes between actors in digital crime prevention, focusing specifically on Swedish municipalities’ implementation of crime preventive technologies.
The project explores new knowledge processes between actors in digital crime prevention, focusing specifically on Swedish municipalities’ implementation of crime preventive technologies. The backdrop to the project is the increased digitalization and the change in the concept of security, from traditional questions of welfare to (fear of) crime. Municipal digital crime prevention is explored through analyzing the complex web of entangled knowledge and mundane activities that actors directly and indirectly involved in digital crime prevention both produce and enact, and how materiality (e.g. digital objects and conditions) plays a role in these processes. The project aims to respond to overall questions on coproduction of knowledge, digitalization and challenges and possibilities within such processes.
Project description
The recent years have witnessed a huge rise in new crime prevention and prediction technologies. While there is an overall lack of studies of such technologies and their societal consequences, previous studies have mainly engaged with predictive policing technologies. But similar technologies are also spreading into local crime preventive work in regions, municipalities, housing companies, etc. Various types of systems, apps, and sensors are purchased to provide efficient crime prevention, reduce crime rates and related costs, strengthen citizen dialogue, and to increase knowledge and collaboration between relevant actors. Such initiatives also bring tension, for example between different prioritizations (economic, political), between different types of (fear of) crime that can or cannot be targeted, as well as between new and old actors (experts, private actors, public officials, citizens) and (knowledge) objects (existing and new systems).
The current project aims to explore such possibilities and tensions through studying the establishment of digital municipal crime prevention in Sweden. Empirically, the material consists of interviews with municipal actors who are responsible for the implementation of new crime prevention technologies, as well as observations and documents related to such practices. The project combines translation and reception perspectives to analyze past, present, and future expectations and implications for knowledge that new crime prevention technologies presuppose and bring.
Project members
Project managers
Katarina Winter
Universitetslektor
