Police Narratives on Ethical Issues of Big Data: A Sociotechnical Approach

Review

Laura Neiva examines how Portuguese police officers narrate the ethical implications of Big Data in policing and criminal investigation. Based on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with members of the Polícia Judiciária and Polícia de Segurança Pública, the paper identifies three recurring mechanisms: anticipatory legitimation through calls for regulation, responsibility displacement toward legislators, judges, and IT professionals, and controlled transparency in which public engagement is framed primarily as a means of securing acceptance. The contribution is not that police officers ignore ethics. It is that ethical language itself can become part of the institutional machinery through which technological expansion is normalized.

The sociotechnical framing is valuable because it shifts attention from whether a stated ethical principle is correct to what institutional work that principle performs. Officers acknowledge privacy, human-rights, and accountability risks, yet often position the practical responsibility for resolving them outside policing. Calls for legal safeguards can therefore simultaneously express genuine concern and create operational leeway by implying that the ethical problem will be solved elsewhere. Likewise, public participation is frequently described not as a way to redistribute decision rights or enable scrutiny, but as communication intended to build trust and reduce resistance. This makes legitimacy an outcome to be managed rather than a judgment that affected publics exercise independently.

The empirical design supports these claims at the level of narrative practice. The interviews span investigators, mid-level officers, and senior officials across two police forces, and the analysis combines inductive qualitative coding with STS concepts of performativity and ethics washing. The paper also avoids reducing its findings to individual bad faith. It explicitly treats ethics washing as an organizational effect rather than a judgment about sincerity. That distinction matters because institutional governance can fail even when participants sincerely endorse ethical values.

The main evidentiary boundary is that the study examines discourse around a technological horizon that was not yet fully operational in Portugal. Officers discussed a mixture of existing analytical tools and anticipated systems such as predictive analytics, cross-database linkage, automated pattern detection, and large-scale surveillance. The evidence therefore establishes how future technological authority is being narrated and legitimated, not how deployed Big Data systems actually redistribute police power in practice. The paper sometimes moves quickly from recurring interview patterns to strategic institutional effects such as minimizing scrutiny. The strongest counterargument is that officers may simply be articulating ordinary professional concerns about legal competence and operational secrecy. Neiva partly resolves this by showing that the recurring pattern is not merely deference to law or expertise, but a systematic separation between police advocacy for expanded data capability and responsibility for its ethical boundaries.

The governance implication is consequential. Responsibility can be dispersed without authority being dispersed. Police retain the operational benefits of data-intensive capability while ethical limits are assigned to external actors who may lack equivalent visibility into police practice. Public communication can then supply legitimacy without giving the public corresponding rights to inspect, challenge, or shape the system. This is the institutional mechanism behind the paper's use of ethics washing.

What would strengthen the proposition is longitudinal evidence connecting these narratives to procurement, deployment, oversight, complaints, and enforcement decisions once data-intensive systems mature. Comparative work could also test whether the same responsibility-displacement pattern appears where police technology is already deeply embedded. Even within its present scope, however, the paper establishes a durable warning for digital governance: ethical vocabulary is not itself evidence of ethical control. Governance requires observable allocation of responsibility, authority, scrutiny, and consequence.

Key Insight

Ethical discourse can weaken governance when institutions use it to project responsibility outward, secure legitimacy, and manage public acceptance without surrendering discretion or creating enforceable constraints.