Preventing prosecution: Narratives on proactive policing

Multi-agency partnerships and intelligence-led policing are among the proactive policing strategies used to manage and prevent crime outside the criminal justice process. Drawing on narrative criminology, this article studies the co-constitution of concrete proactive policing methods and the populations and crimes that they are directed at. Further, the article illuminates the variety of distinct approaches that are understood in the studied policing context as ‘preventive’, a term found to be applicable to any police strategy or method that does not involve investigation and is not aimed at building a criminal case for prosecution. Whereas crime prevention effects are considered desirable and achievable, at least in theory, the internal organisational aim to prevent prosecution exerts an influence on how crimes as well as the crime prevention mandate are made sense of and rendered actionable.