ABSTRACT

The notion of subculture has suffered greatly from overuse. In our current time developments in that technological infrastructure include the rapid deployment of information technology, especially software capable of handling large-scale data sets pertaining to suspect populations. By thinking about various types of global 'sub'-cultures merely through such theoretical abstractions the sociologist invariably sacrifices precision for theoretical breadth. In what follows the term 'subculture' is constructed around a specific problem, that is: the emergence of a transnational police enterprise. It involves a word inversion which establishes a cognitive space – that space lying between the notions of the transnational subculture of police and the subculture of transnational policing. When we examine the literature on what is variously described as cross-border police 'co-operation', the 'internationalization' of policing or its 'transnationalization', the role of information technology is recurrent. Particularly problematic is the expanding surveillance capacity of police in the transnational realm.