Policing the city in the digital age: a new research agenda

Digitalisation is transforming both the city as an environment of policing and policing itself, creating new conditions for how urban order is produced, governed and contested. Digitalisation reshapes urban societies and governance by creating new spheres of interaction, representation and political engagement. It simultaneously transforms policing, both formal and informal, through new tools, actors and spaces of regulation and surveillance. Rather than treating these processes separately, the paper integrates three bodies of literature: research on policing of cities and neighbourhoods, digitalisation and cities and digitalisation and policing. This synthesis identifies key gaps in the research and proposes five analytical entry points for future research that foreground the following concerns: 1. digital agenda-setting in policing and the diversification of actors in policing cities, 2. new digital-spatial configurations of policing and inequality, 3. practice shifts in researching digitalisation in urban policing, 4. the challenge of policing a digital society in the post-truth era, and 5. critical thinking on the limits of technology. These entry points advance a research agenda that situates policing within the complex social, spatial and political transformations of contemporary cities.