CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue of Archives of Criminology (Archiwum Kryminologii) Technologies in Policing:
Practices, Power and Consequences

Guest Editors

Paweł Waszkiewicz
Marleen Easton
Daniela Hunold
Megan O’Neill

Rationale of the Special Issue

Technology has long been an integral part of policing. Yet the scale, pace and diversity of technological change have made its role increasingly important for understanding contemporary police organisations and practices. Digital information systems, databases, surveillance technologies, body-worn cameras, mobile devices, biometrics, automated recognition systems, social media, analytical tools, drones, digital evidence technologies and, more recently, artificial intelligence are changing how police organisations collect and process information, interact with citizens, make decisions, allocate resources and produce evidence.

Technological change in policing, however, is not simply a matter of introducing new tools. Technologies are developed, selected and implemented within particular organisational, legal, political and cultural settings. Their actual use may differ substantially from their intended purpose. Police officers and organisations may adopt, adapt, resist, circumvent or abandon technologies; technological systems may reinforce existing practices as much as transform them. At the same time, their consequences may extend well beyond police organisations, affecting prosecutors, courts and other actors across the criminal justice process.

This Special Issue seeks to advance criminological understanding of how technologies become part of policing and what happens when they do. We are particularly interested in the interaction between technologies, police practices, organisational structures, professional cultures, decision-making, discretion and institutional environments. Beyond their organisational functions, we also seek to understand how technologies are embedded in broader social and political power relations, how they shape everyday encounters between police and the public, and how they contribute to the production, reproduction or contestation of social order and inequalities.

We particularly welcome empirically grounded contributions examining technologies as they are actually introduced, used and experienced in policing. Qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies are encouraged, including ethnographies, observations, interviews, surveys, experiments, analyses of administrative or case-file data and comparative research.

At the same time, we welcome theoretical and conceptual contributions that help explain the development and use of technologies in law enforcement, the conditions shaping their adoption and operation, and their broader consequences for policing, criminal justice and society.

The Special Issue is deliberately not limited to artificial intelligence or other emerging technologies. AI and algorithmic systems fall within its scope, but contributions are equally welcome on established, mundane or less visible technologies whose effects on policing may be no less significant.

Possible areas of contribution

We invite submissions addressing issues including, but not limited to:

• the adoption, implementation and institutionalisation of technologies in police organisations;
• the everyday use, adaptation, appropriation, non-use or resistance to technologies by police officers and other practitioners;
• the relationship between technology and police discretion, decision-making and professional judgement;
• the impact of technologies on police organisational structures, routines, occupational cultures and working practices;
• body-worn cameras, CCTV and other visual surveillance technologies;
• databases, information systems, intelligence platforms and technologies of information sharing;
• biometric technologies, facial recognition and other automated identification systems;
• mobile technologies and digital tools used in everyday police work;
• social media and digital communication technologies in policing;
• technologies for collecting, managing, analysing and presenting digital evidence;
• data-driven, predictive, algorithmic and AI-supported policing;
• drones, robotics and other remote or automated technologies;
• technologies of surveillance, monitoring and social control, including their spatial dimensions and their use in the policing of protests and political dissent;
• the relationship between technological systems and police accountability, transparency and legitimacy;
• the effects of technologies on police-public encounters, including the experiences, perceptions and responses of individuals and communities subjected to technologically mediated policing;
• inequalities, discrimination and differential impacts associated with technological policing;
• privacy, fundamental rights and the legal regulation of police technologies;
• procurement, private technology providers and public–private relationships in the development of policing technologies;
• failures, unintended consequences, workarounds and technological systems that do not work as anticipated;
• historical developments and changing technological infrastructures of policing;
• comparative and cross-national studies of police technologies;
• the relationship between technological change and broader transformations of police organisations and police work;
• the production, transformation and circulation of knowledge and evidence through technological systems;
• the consequences of police technologies beyond policing itself, including their effects on investigation, prosecution, adjudication and other stages of the criminal justice process.

We are especially interested in contributions that move beyond asking whether a technology “works” and instead examine how, under what conditions, for whom and with what consequences technologies operate in policing.

The Special Issue aims to bring together research from different jurisdictions and methodological traditions and to encourage dialogue between criminology, policing studies, sociology, law, socio-legal studies, science and technology studies and related fields.

Basic Information

1. Archives of Criminology (Archiwum Kryminologii) is a peer-reviewed criminological journal published by the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences indexed in Scopus.
2. The Special Issue will publish papers only in English.
3. Authors are invited in the first stage to submit an abstract of approximately 200–300 words, outlining the research question, approach or theoretical argument, methods where applicable, and the anticipated contribution to the Special Issue.
4. Authors of selected abstracts will subsequently be invited to submit a full paper. Selection of an abstract does not guarantee publication. All full manuscripts will undergo the Journal’s regular peer-review process.
5. Full papers should normally be about 9,000 words, maximum length 12,000 words, including references, in accordance with the Journal’s guidelines.
6. The issue will be published open access, with no article processing charges (APCs) or publication fees for authors.

Preliminary timeline
Deadline for abstracts: November 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: December 15, 2026.
Deadline for submission of full papers: March 31, 2027.
Expected publication: The issue is expected to be published in December 2027/January 2028. Accepted papers will be published immediately at the journal's website as online-first. Submission

Abstracts should be submitted through: https://ankiety.inp.pan.pl/index.php/628469?lang=en

Further information concerning Archives of Criminology and guidelines for authors is available on the Journal’s website: https://czasopisma.inp.pan.pl/index.php/ak/autorzy

Contact
Guest Editors:
Paweł Waszkiewicz:    p.waszkiewicz@uw.edu.pl
Megan O’Neill:             m.oneill@dundee.ac.uk
Marleen Easton:           Marleen.Easton@ugent.be
Daniela Hunold:           Daniela.Hunold@hwr-berlin.de