The polycrisis, it is widely proposed, is a marker of our age. Crises have long been an unexpected yet recurring part of social life, calling for action that tackles the insecurity of the moment and brings stability. With this shift towards ‘polycrisis governance’ we also observe a change in the role of the police. Crises function as periods of experimentation, presenting vital opportunities for accelerating policing transformations. The implementation of digital technologies plays an important role in the current transformation of policing. For example, the digitalization of policing in the Nordics has been particularly associated with the expansion of policing into private actors, enabling the immersion of a variety of non-state actors, such as the American Palantir Technologies, in policing practices. In the case of Denmark, Palantir has supplied the police with a data-driven platform (POL-INTEL). The platform functions by connecting disparate state and non-state databases into one interface. Paraphrasing the Invisible Committee (2017), since the time when law enforcement started to be transformed into a techno-legal operation conducted day after day, it was inevitable that policing would become a political question. Through a critical investigation, I trace ideological aspects of how private actors, carriers of specific ideological ethos (such as the Silicon Valley ideology), have contributed to the transformation of the state monopoly to violence.
Galis contributes with expertise on the digitalisation of the welfare state, transformations of police work and technology and society research.