As part of researching police work in the streets some of us saw this strange device on the wrist of a plain-clothes police officer during a major political street protest. While it certainly looks like a digital clock, what it exactly is, and what its function is, remains unknown to us.
As unknown devices spark the imagination and the desire to know, we decided to post this image to pique the interest of our readers on not just this object, but to wider digital and technological transformations of law enforcement in the digital era. These new devices are interesting because they are not as distinct, or as easily identified, as some classical technologies of policing such as the handcuff. Instead, the variety of new apparatuses that we see police officers carry are much opaquer. This is particularly true because most of these new innovations are digital tools of policing and thereby have an inner, algorithmic, structure which cannot easily be accessed by outsiders. So even when we can understand that a device is a camera, or a tool for data analysis, we might not really be able to understand its function as easily as we might with, say, a police baton. Indeed, it is often the case that exactly how these new police technologies function, is also difficult for police themselves to understand. This is why we call these apparatuses black boxes.
One of the things we are trying to do in this project is thus to “open the black box” of police technologies, to understand where they are coming from, how they are used, what they are connected to, how that changes police work, and so on and so forth. So little things like a strange device on the wrist of an officer is a helpful way to start thinking about the black box of police work. It picks at our curiosity, and maybe yours as well.
Do you happen to know what the device is? Email us!