Adding Government to Proof: Police Reports, the Limits of Standardization, and Data Proliferation in Crime Analysis

This paper engages how crime analysts turn “ill-structured” reports into “good,” analyzable data. Based on qualitative field research in a police department, the empirical analysis retraces the manual labor that is necessary to navigate the conflicting informational requirements of the criminal justice system and aggregate analytics. Building on Desrosières’ concept of the duality of data as both “proof” and “government,” the paper explicates how, vis-à-vis the limits of standardization in police reporting, analysts revert to forms of data proliferation to create (temporary) governmental functions while leaving the original structure and proof function of reports, as required by the logics of the criminal justice system, intact. In explicating this work, the paper contributes to debates in STS and criminology by foregrounding the role of manual labor in reconciling different knowledge and communication logics that characterize the tensions between proof and government.