Abstract
How do databases change policing? Police work is simultaneously heavily physical and highly bound by abstraction. Police exercise coercive power with the mandate of abstractions of law, regulations and record-keeping. In making an arrest, an officer acts physically, but also in language: transforming the subject into one in a state of being under arrest. This paper specifically examines the recently implemented Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) to explore how computers affect the interplay of the abstractions of law and regulations with bodies in space.
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