Predicting protest: Conceptual framing and moral legitimization of predictive policing on social movements in the Netherlands by Dutch security actors.

Abstract

This thesis examines how Dutch security actors conceptually frame and morally legitimize predictive policing in the context of protest, and what underlying governmental rationalities shape its development. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and frame analysis of ethnographic and interview data collected during a six-month internship at the police intelligence department. The study reveals that security actors use two dominant diagnostic frames: the first being capacity strain, which highlights the pressure on limited police resources due to the increasing number and complexity of protests; the second is unpredictability, which refers to the growing difficulty in anticipating when, where, and how protests will unfold. These challenges are not merely seen as technical or logistical issues, but are securitized as threats to the functioning of the police and their ability to fulfill core mandates. Predictive policing emerges as a proposed solution, morally legitimized through appeals to public safety, professionalization, and technological objectivity. To explain the origins of these frames and moral justifications, the thesis draws on the concepts of governmental rationalities, specifically legibility, bureaucratization, and techno-security culture, to demonstrate how such framings and legitimizations are embedded within governmental rationalities that resonates with Dutch security actors. It further argues that techno-security culture is driven by security actors pursuit of legibility and bureaucratic order. Illustrating that datafication and algorithmic governance is not a revolutionary break from traditional forms of governance, but a continuity of known governmental rationalities in an new technological environment. Predictive policing of protest is thereby not merely a technological innovation but a reflection of deeper rationalities of governance. Namely the rationalities of making society legible and standardizing procedures bureaucratically to restore security actors autonomy and control.