- The Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology, and the Rationality of Crime Control
Peter Manning seems to agree with anthropologist Michael Herzfeld that modern bureaucracies, no matter how rational their organization, do not transcend the contingency of practice. This means that late modern organizations are fraught with as much charisma and conflict as are the traditional societies anthropologists ordinarily study. Manning adds technology to this thesis, demonstrating that the tools of late modern society cannot remove the messiness of local systems of meaning. Expanding on the classical works of Max Weber, Manning injects policing in late modern American society into questions of whether technology enhances the rational capacity of such organizations. Whereas Weber expressed concern that formal, technical rationality would eclipse more substantive rationality as well as creativity in collective decision-making, Manning is able to demonstrate that the former has not successfully replaced the latter.
With the map and mapping technology as his privileged artifacts, Manning traces the social, political, and economic relationships necessary to incorporate such tools into what he describes as a uniquely "medieval" organization. As "cops on the ground" are dependent on highly embodied skills to fulfill the public expectations leveled at them, they tend to resist the information technologies that introduce abstract systems into their routines. Theirs is a more practical rationality creating inertia in broader efforts to convert practical knowledge into decontextualized information.
Plural and competing rationalities contained by fields of power shape competition for scarce public resources; this is the structural backdrop to all police organizations. The ethnographic nature of Manning's study inspired close investigation of the actual practices creating such structures and fields, so his investigation fits between sociological inquiries into the relationship between structure and agency and an anthropological concern for the semiotic nature of all tools and technology. Manning employs a particular innovation in ethnographic methodology, however, by incorporating phenomenology as a theoretical frame for his interpretations of three case studies. This establishes his agenda as non-predictive; he is not drawing causal relationships across time or between cases.
This also highlights the fact that reality is something actively produced by intentional social agents bound by the limits of context. It is the task of the researcher to penetrate the taken-for-granted reality of agents and then logically link them back to the reality of the academic. The meaning-adequacy of technology is something that must be intersubjectively produced as well, so Manning regularly reminds his readers that technologically produced [End Page 492] artifacts like the GIS (Geographic Information System) maps generated for the purpose of crime analysis do not speak for themselves.
To illustrate this more deeply, he focuses on the Crime Analysis Meetings (CAM) regularly staged by the Boston Police Department. Thick descriptions of such meetings show that crime maps became part of a highly choreographed ritual structured by a fixed sequence of presentations, seating arrangements, and costuming that highlight rank and division of labor. Because the maps further provided a relationship to crime data based on narrowly visible surfaces and juxtapositions, participants were neither free to engage the data critically nor to establish meaningful connections between personal experiences and the maps presented. The many layers of expertise that went into crafting the software, collecting and geocoding the data, and then manipulating ArcView (or a similar program) were invisible to the front stage of the meetings. The CAMs therefore deepened the magical quality of the "dazzling" visuals made possible by GIS.
Ultimately, Manning is able to make a compelling case that technology has no autonomous material agency and no necessary relationship to rationality or crime prevention. Though it contributes to the narrowing of discursive possibility in CAMs, it is just one part of a broad performance established to ritualistically affirm a traditional status hierarchy and division of labor. As he most aptly states, "The workings of technologies . . . are best seen or revealed by looking at how people use them" (pp. 72-73).
Dr. Jackson, associate professor of anthropology at...