Techno-digital policing and speculative fictions: Towards a criminology of the future

Abstract

This paper argues for a criminology of the future. This matters at a time when the accelerating use of technologically-supported and digitally enhanced (techno-digital) policing methods outpaces our ability to take stock of their social and criminal justice effects. Criminology and policing studies have been swift to address the organisational and operational complexities of techno-digital transformations, and have raised critical questions of the politico-ethical implications of this qualitatively different paradigm of policing. However, this scholarship remains marginal to, and is eclipsed by futures-facing technoscientific research agendas which continually bring the future into being through practices of building, inventing, designing and experimenting. Criminology steps lightly, if at all, into the future. Trapped by the conventions of retrospective analyses, the discipline has difficulty engaging with uncertainty and the unknown, and is reluctant to speculate on worlds-to-come. This paper works towards a criminology of the future, and does so by firstly, drawing on Jasanoff’s notion of sociotechnical imaginaries to unpack the strategic, forward-looking discourse of contemporary techno-digital policing; and secondly, using science fiction – specifically cyberpunk cinema – as an analytical tool for probing the possible futures of today’s techno-digital investments. The speculative fictions of cyberpunk films can guide, warn against, anticipate and inspire innovative frames of reference which not only raise difficult and incisive questions about the transformative complexities of techno-digital innovation, but also bring criminology into productive alliance with the sub-disciplinary fields of futures, cultural, film, policing and science and technology studies.