Fingerprinting and Biopolitical Police Surveillance in Turkey

Abstract

This paper problematises the 2007 amendments to Article 5 of the Police Powers and Duties Law (PPDL) in Turkey that categorises all citizens as ‘potential suspects’ through fingerprinting technology. The amended article requires everyone to submit fingerprint samples when applying for certain official documents such as driver's licences, passports, and ID cards. Consequently, the result has been dramatic: the police have so far proactively recorded more than 60 million people's fingerprints in the process of issuing these documents. Yet, there has been no research into this phenomenon. This paper suggests that this sort of biometric police surveillance is not a recent development, rather part of a long tradition within policing ‘Turkish’ national interests. Following Foucault's genealogical methodology, the paper argues that the governability of a large heterogeneous population across a vast territory has always demanded biometric policing technologies, addressing biopolitical proximity between the capacity building of modern security apparatus and identifying the unknown masses. Studying the historical data comparatively reveals that fingerprinting first started with recording exceptional groups such as criminals and convicts in Europe, while from the late Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, large sections of the population have always persistently been targeted by police regulations.