ABSTRACT
Through fi ve seasons of the television series The Wire, we follow an ongoing game between police and criminals, at the complex borderline between morality and immorality, success and failure, individual choices and collective mechanisms. One of the threads that runs through this sociological fi ction of urban life is the strategies and problematizations that can be related to governing by numbers. The examples here stretch from attempts to not take responsibility for fourteen dead prostitutes (the risk of bad statistics) to a tough campaign to improve confi dence in policing by reducing the number of crimes. In the latter case, weekly statistical reports have a double effect in the organization. On the one hand, they stimulate attempts at new ways of policing. On the other hand, and this is the more common reaction, they stimulate a practice of decentralized, creative use of statistical categories in the police reports. In this way, in a co-constructive process between police work and monitoring through numbers, new tactics and techniques are invented, implemented, and used to improve the outcomes of policing (see also Williams, Lomell, and Gundhus in this volume).
