Automated offices in police vehicles: Understanding new connections between street-level and screen- level work

Abstract

Police vehicles are becoming "automated offices" in which officers continuously interact with a variety of systems for their work "on the streets". How does this change the work of police officers? For this chapter, I closely follow - using ethnography - a public sector innovation in the Dutch National Police, named "Automated Office in Police Vehicle" [in Dutch: KID]. Its key affordances allow police officers to finalize their administration and access to police applications that were previously less accessible on the streets. Thereby, KID brings together the street-level and screen-level work of police officers: the car becomes their "office". This study contrasts key differences between two types of police officer (highway police officers and local police officers) and analyzes how these differences result in differentiated emerging practices of administration, retrieving information and social interaction, enabled by the use of KID. This research advances our empirical understanding of the new connections between street-level and screen-level work.