ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a set of methodological and normative issues related to technological developments and policy transformations in contemporary policing. It draws from data in the Netherlands, where the prioritization of the issue of 'problematic youth groups' on the government agenda entailed a proactive crackdown approach to sort out the problems generated by these youth. The chapter presents the ways in which actor-network theory is particularly relevant for understanding how youth group classifications, their statistics, problematic character, suspicious behaviour and the very notion of 'youth group' are constructed or performed within technologically mediated practices. It analyses police practices promoted by the crack-down approach, illustrating the ways in which youth groups are classified, mapped, and monitored. The chapter argues that a particular alignment of technological, policy, and organizational factors engenders the translation of the issue of 'problematic youth groups' into an information problem, fostering automatic monitoring of a growing number of youth.
