Police emergency service as a form of practice

The emergency services are one of the most essential points of contact with the police. Nevertheless, there is still little research on this topic in German-speaking countries. The study Praxisform Polizeinotruf uses the example of Austria to examine public debates surrounding police emergency services as well as the practice in police control rooms where calls for intervention are processed. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital communication technologies. Methodologically, the publication combines a media discourse analysis with ethnographic explorations in control rooms. The author, Philipp Knopp, develops an innovative approach to practice form analysis. He shows that the basic issues of emergency services lie in the mobilization and control of civil vigilance and police intervention. On the one hand, people are encouraged to keep a close eye on their surroundings and report disturbances and dangers to the police. On the other hand, police assess these reports in discourse and conversations and guide them according to the criteria of police intervention. In the field of tension between these complex challenges, emergency call processing systematically generates, evaluates, and distributes knowledge about dangerous events, everyday disorders, and the police themselves. The emergency services, then, are more than rapid response; they are an epistemic form of practice. The study situates changes in the police emergency service system within long-term transformations of the Austrian security sector, arguing that emergency services have become a central resource of a new policing paradigm in which the population is activated to participate in security production. Since police control rooms are fundamentally dependent on communication technologies, the study also examines how a new computer-aided dispatch system is implemented and how it molds control room practices. The detailed analysis shows, among other things, how police officers use technical features to assess the credibility of callers and how this epistemic profiling creates differences and inequalities. In addition, it traces how intervention spaces are constructed and how practices of give and take between control room staff and patrol units dynamize police mobilization. The complex practice form analysis thus makes it possible to situate emergency call processing historically and describe its everyday tensions and problems in a multifaceted way. The study, therefore, prepares the ground for new questions about police practice as responsive in/security. Security is understood as a form of responding to social challenges that acquires certain response- abilities and responsibilities.