Various smartphone apps and services are available which encourage users to report where and when they feel they are in an unsafe or threatening environment.-This user generated content may be used to build datasets, which can show areas that are considered 'bad,' and to map out 'safe' routes through such neighbourhoods.-Despite certain advantages, this data inherently carries the danger that streets or neighbourhoods become stigmatized and already existing prejudices might be reinforced.-Such stigmas might also result in negative consequences for property values and businesses, causing irreversible damage to certain parts of a municipality.-Overcoming such an "evidence-based stigma"-even if based on biased, unreviewed, outdated, or inaccurate data-becomes nearly impossible and raises the question how such data should be managed.

A Pokémon Go-like smartphone app called 'Automon' was unveiled in October 2017 as one of several new initiatives to increase the public's contribution and engagement in police investigations in the Netherlands. Automon is designed in the form of a game that instigates participants to photograph license plates to find out if a vehicle is stolen. The participants in the game score points for each license plate photographed, and may also qualify for a financial reward if a vehicle is actually stolen. In addition, when someone reports that a vehicle has been recently stolen, game participants that are in the vicinity receive a push notification and are tasked with searching for that particular vehicle and license plate. This paper studies the example of the Automon app and contributes to the existing debate on crowdsourced surveillance and the involvement of individuals in law enforcement activities from an EU law perspective. It analyses the lawfulness of initiatives that proactively require individuals to be involved in law enforcement activities and confronts them for the first time with European Union (EU) data protection standards. It is concluded that the Automon app design does not meet the new legal standards.

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In the United States of America, police body-worn cameras (bodycams) were introduced to protect civilians against violence by law enforcement authorities. In the Netherlands, however, the same technology has been introduced to record and discipline the behavior of the growing number of citizens using their smartphone cameras to film the (mis)conduct of police. In answer to these citizens sousveilling the police and publishing their images on social media, the bodycam was introduced as an objective referee that also includes the perspective of the police officer. According to this view, the bodycam is a tool of equiveillance: a situation with a diversity of perspectives in which surveillance and sousveillance are in balance (Mann 2005). Various factors, however, hamper the equiveillant usage of bodycams in the Netherlands. Firstly, the attachment of the bodycam to the uniform of the officer leads to an imbalanced representation of perspectives. The police perspective is emphasized by the footage that is literally taken from their perspective, in which others are filmed slightly from below, making them look bigger and more overwhelming. Also, the police officers’ movements create shaky footage with deceptive intensity that invokes the image of a hectic situation that calls for police action. Secondly, it is the officer who decides when to wear a camera and when to start and stop recording. This leaves the potential to not record any misconduct. Thirdly, access to the recorded images, whilst in theory open to police and citizens alike, is in practice exclusively for the police. Within the current regulatory framework, bodycams are thus not neutral reporters of interactions between civilians and the police. We will end our contribution to this Dialogue section with suggestions for the improvement of those rules and reflect on the question of whether bodycams can ever be objective referees.

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