Scientification through privatization:POL-INTEL in Denmark

Based on the empirical case of the POL-INTEL platform used by the Danish police, which is a customized version of Palantir Technologies’ Gotham platform, this article traces the interrelation between scientification and policing in the digital era as articulated in and through a private actor. Ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, publicly available policy documents as well as documents detailing police practices, organization, ambitions and workflows are used to problematize digital policing platforms and practices in terms of wider criminological theories and models. We show that POL-INTEL epitomizes a historical trajectory of scientification through privatization by drawing together intelligence practices, market logics, and datafication methodologies. With this point of departure, we trace back how the entanglement of private actors and the police organization raises concerns about the black boxing of criminological procedures, and the delegation of decisions and knowledge within the criminal justice system to private actors lacking public values.<br/

Performing and evaluating creditworthiness: Bank loans and the financial inclusion of micro/small enterprises in China

Despite being key to China's economic development, micro and small enterprises have long faced difficulties in accessing bank financing. Consequently, the government has introduced digital lending platforms like “Credit Easy Loan” to enable “creditworthy” microentrepreneurs to obtain collateral-free loans. These platforms are expected to collect and integrate social credit data, thus easing the information asymmetry between banks and private enterprises. Based on 10 months of fieldwork in two Chinese cities, this paper investigates banks’ digital and nondigital credit assessment practices and the varied experiences of business loan applicants. It finds that banks and microentrepreneurs may work with underground intermediaries to manipulate application material for different purposes. Microentrepreneurs, especially those without local tangible assets or social networks, still face credit constrains, and discrimination in loan applications. This paper hopes to further our understanding of the social practice around digitalized credit and the dynamics between financial inclusion policies and local implementation