#OpenAccess in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (@jocn.bsky.social): Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia

Actor-Network Theory (as per criminologists)

Just read an article in @theoreticalcrim.bsky.social that has completely misattributed and misinterpreted Deleuze, and re-signified concepts without sufficient reason. Don’t even get me started on argumentative flaws. Sad to see this on our discipline’s only theoretical journal

UK is getting its Aadhar

TL;DR: Verizon is being held accountable for unlawfully tracking and selling customer location data without proper disclosure or consent, raising serious privacy concerns.

The silence of certain immigration scholars on Far Right marches, rise of Reform and its policies, and everyday embodied harms of migrantphobia is alarming and concerning. Pick a side, speak up, before it’s too late. Don’t compel us to expose your duplicity and hypocrisy.

My fieldwork has now brought me to Hyderabad, where I am conducting research with India’s most technologically advanced police force. I look forward to developing a deeper, more contextually grounded understanding of the social life of algorithmic evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions

As part of my PhD fieldwork, I have joined Bureau of Police Research & Development - India’s state-owned policing think tank. I’ll be working as a research assistant for Tech & Modernisation Division - looking at use of AI in criminal investigation and evidence construction

I love sharing reports from left-leaning media outlets in my right-wing heavy family WhatsApp groups just to redistribute the pains of cognitive overloading.

Proposed changes to tax laws are simply providing a remote legal backing to an already prevalent police practice - confiscating devices and roving inspection of personal chats

This week Inquest covered false promises: that the “new” drug war would be less punitive and more focused on public health (it is not), and that big tech policing product ShotSpotter makes communities safer (it does not). Read the full recap: mailchi.mp/inquest.o...

It’s all in the ground truth (or the lack thereof)

Defence AI is built by, and for, war capitalists.

U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...

Authoritarian regimes have not just Co-opted “decolonisation” and “sovereignty”, but also “privacy” and “data protection”. State is claiming privacy against its own citizens.

Delhi Police arresting people based on facial recognition match score of 32%! At this point, such machine-driven ‘intelligence’ is simply a legitimation/rationalisation exercise.

Thinking of Karen Barad’s relational ontology. ‘Identification’ here is no longer a search for pre-existing reality but a discursive tool to actively shape and produce reality. The reality here being “criminality”.

An important thread on the new Sentencing Council guidelines on pre-sentencing reports

Facial recognition is not about identification, it’s about labelling. The state doesn’t want to ‘see’ you, it already sees you and wants to ‘unsee you’ by legitimising its ways of (un)seeing as the only appropriate way of seeing.

Tenure should empower academics to pursue radical research, to speak truth to power and to fight for transformative progress, but my tenured colleagues seem to just chase the money, obediently follow power and fight only for the progress of their CVs

Columbia is as example of why protestors/encampments were demanding review/divestment of funding sources. Universities have failed this litmus test, rather, shown their true colours. But guess what, so called tenured “critical scholars” will continue to benefit from this.

SOCMINT research needs to be revived.

While aggregated data on attacks on police is publicly available, the same for attacks by the police is nowhere to be found - and now being actively denied under “right to privacy” of the officers involved. Classic case of weaponising liberal reforms discourse

Theft in India is punishable with up to 2 years in jail, deemed a petty offence as per settled law. Arrest should only be made in exceptional circumstances. But FRT cameras has turned this upside down - amplifying the criminalisation and detention of those accused of petty, not serious offences

Police tech providers in India are moving from “here’s our product” to “you can’t do it without us” - I’m guessing what would be the obvious next step!

Indian state of UP spent 400 million INR to procure “AI crowd management tool” which was only used for counting footfall. Despite this, a tragic stampede took place where hundreds (still counting) lost their lives. Later, more money was spent in pushing positive ads for “digital kumbh”

Senior police officers in India call themselves “data fiduciaries”, but in the same breath go on to share their visions of a data warehouse that integrates static and real-time data from both state and private entities (delivery apps, e-commerce apps, home IOTs).

Funny how European scholars keep using “risk profiles” instead of “control profiles” to refer to group-based profiling of people. ‘Risk’ both sanitises and legitimises the deeply political, dehumanising, and subjugating logics (and legacies) of racialised group-based profiling.

Love archival research - as someone who does empirical research in criminal justice, archives (to an extent) are the least triggering, traumatising, and exhausting, source for data. Fun fact: colonial archives are more easily accessible than postcolonial ones 💀

Digital infrastructures in policing - both materially and symbolically - are mobilised arbitrarily. ‘Efficiency’, thereby, both in its functional and discursive operation, is multivalent, fluid, contingent to the context in which it is invoked - becoming complicit in punitive-political policing

From the Field: “We don’t use them much, given Delhi’s traffic, we prefer bikes or our normal cars … they’re too big, if we use them, we’ll never reach the spot in time” … “but they look cool, right? mostly for the show, I’d say” - patrol officers on the new “mobile” high-tech fleet.

The DeepSeek saga teaches us that nothing spurs tech innovation like extreme US regulatory interference

My observations from the field reveals how a combination of road infrastructure, driving habits, ease of obtaining fake number plates, traffic, dust pollution, and monkeys, disrupt the seamless sociotechnical imaginaries of Automatic Number Plate Reader (ANPR) cameras in a Himalayan state.

In India, it’s really difficult to do quant research on criminal justice decision-making. Not just due to access, but sheer terrible recording practices. Judges often omit vital details while recording orders/judgements - making secondary data analysis very unreliable

Honored to have my work on sentence review of lifers in India featured in this article by the Institute of Criminology @cambridgeuni.bsky.social Grateful for the opportunity to be interviewed for this piece and share insights on how my research contributed to the release of a lifer after 26 years!

Hybridisation of public/security/policing infrastructures is not just the question of efficiency, but also of politics of recognition, resistance, and redemption.

Notes from the field: immune (so far) from race to algorithmic policing, this police station in a hilly state in India still uses pin-maps for patrol allocations

Notes from the field: I was surprised to see how the neatly drawn boundaries of public-private divide collapse in digital policing projects. (1/2)

From the fieldwork: software engineers in India’s state-owned computing agency reveal the ‘boundary-work’ required to work on policing projects. One theme is the value of having a govt job - the prestige it brings. So one must focus on the task and not the “noise”, on the code and not the coded

Is researcher dysphoria a thing?

My paper in Punishment & Society discusses sentence review decision-making for life prisoners in India. Based on findings from quant-qual sequential design, I argue that SRB significantly violates lifers’ right to meaningful consideration for early release. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...