Journal: CURATE Working Paper

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ETH Zurich, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences

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2022 - 20265
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Publications 1 - 5 of 5
  • Counting crime? A review on the production of crime data
    Item type: Working Paper
    Bettex, Sophie (2024)
    CURATE Working Paper
    This literature review is aimed at providing an overview of the arguments, concerns, and issues raised by criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists regarding crime data and their quality. Given the increasing, widespread use of (crime) data to serve analytical purposes (e.g., predictive policing) and global discussions and measures on big data (policing), this review presents relevant and timely insights. It assists our understanding of how crime data are produced, handled, and influenced by first laying out its development and historical background. The main finding of this review is that while crime data are biased and commonly of ‘low quality’, knowledge on how they are produced, manipulated, and influenced by various actors and factors remains limited and difficult to obtain. As opposed to ‘zooming into’ crime data to ameliorate it, the findings indicate the necessity and urgency to ‘zoom into’ the practices of those who create and curate them.
  • Data curation: A conceptual framework for the study of data quality
    Item type: Working Paper
    Leese, Matthias (2023)
    CURATE Working Paper
    This Working Paper introduces the concept of data curation as a framework for the study of data quality from a social science perspective. Data curation can be understood as a specific set of data practices that is geared towards making and maintaining the trustworthiness of data and explicates how data require continuous care-taking. Analytically, it offers several advantages to the study of data quality. First of all, it draws attention to the fact that data quality is predicated on distributed forms of labour among various social actors and technical means. Secondly, it explicates the multiple interaction points between humans and data along the lives of data and their journeys through the world. And finally, it introduces a terminology that speaks to the needs of practitioners as well as to academic theory -building.
  • Between control and empowerment: Data quality in border and migration management
    Item type: Working Paper
    Leese, Matthias (2024)
    CURATE Working Paper
    This Working Paper conceptually explores the role of data quality in European migration and border management. Drawing on the notion of legibility as well as the dual nature of identification, it examines how forms of datafied representation – and notably their reliability – impact both state power and migrant experiences. The analysis highlights that data quality should be understood as a tool for both empowerment and control, with implications for both regulation and oversight.
  • Data quality in governance: A definition and a research agenda
    Item type: Working Paper
    Leese, Matthias (2022)
    CURATE Working Paper
  • Towards systematic data governance in law enforcement
    Item type: Working Paper
    Leese, Matthias (2026)
    CURATE Working Paper
    As police work becomes increasingly data-driven, data quality has emerged as a key operational and ethical concern. This Working Paper explores how police organizations can improve data governance by addressing recurring structural, technical, and procedural problems. Drawing on findings from the CURATE Project, including a large survey and an in-depth case study on European law enforcement and border control, it identifies persistent challenges such as fragmented IT systems, inconsistent data entry, and unclear responsibility for data quality. To address these issues, the paper proposes the creation of a dedicated Data Stewardship Un it (DSU) within police organizations. Such a unit could standardize data practices, strengthen legal and ethical compliance, and improve coordination across units. While establishing a DSU requires political will, resources, and some IT reform, the Working Paper argues that growing awareness of data quality makes this a timely and necessary step to ensure both effective and legitimate policing.
Publications 1 - 5 of 5