This article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discourses of resilience. This article charts the emergence and proliferation of security-driven resilience logics, deployed at different spatial scales, which exist in tension with each other. We exemplify such tensions in practice through a detailed case study from Birmingham, UK: 'Project Champion' an attempt to install over 200 high-resolution surveillance cameras, often invisibly, around neighbourhoods with a predominantly Muslim population. Here, practices of security-driven resilience came into conflict with other policy priorities focused upon community-centred social cohesion, posing a series of questions about social control, surveillance and the ability of national agencies to construct community resilience in local areas amidst state attempts to label the same spaces as 'dangerous'. It is argued that security-driven logics of resilience generate conflicts in how resilience is operationalized, and produce and reproduce new hierarchical arrangements which, in turn, may work to subvert some of the founding aspirations and principles of resilience logic itself.

This article outlines and contextualizes the development of digital sociology as an introduction to this e-special issue, charting the development of the field through the pages of the journal, Sociology. In doing so, the article sketches key contours of this rich and varied terrain, accenting how technological innovation has permeated the domains of politics, culture and society. Of central concern has been the intellectual origins of ‘digital sociology’. While first coined in 2009, the article highlights a longer history, noting the continued resonance of modernity’s currents of categorization, ordering and rationality while recognizing the crucial shifts brought by digitally mediated life. The article then discusses landmark articles contributing to the development of digital sociology, beginning with interventions seeking to theorize digital society. We then turn to articles focusing on methodological questions before addressing the digital turn in selected areas of enduring sociological concern including: work and organizations; inequality; migration; activism; communities; emotions; and everyday life. The article concludes with a series of observations regarding potential futures of digital sociological analyses.

Predictive policing generally refers to police work that utilises strategies, algorithmic technologies, and big data to generate near-future predictions about the people and places deemed likely to be involved in or experience crime. Claimed benefits of predictive policing centre on the technology's ability to enable pre-emptive police work by automating police decisions. The goal is that officers will rely on computer software and smartphone applications to instruct them about where and who to police just as Uber drivers rely on similar technologies to instruct them about where to pick up passengers. Unfortunately, little is known about the experiences of the in-field users of predictive technologies. This article helps fill this gap by addressing the under researched area of how police officers engage with predictive technologies. As such, data is presented that outlines the findings of a qualitative study with UK police organisations involved in designing and trialing predictive policing software. Research findings show that many police officers have a detailed awareness of the limitations of predictive technologies, specifically those brought about by errors and biases in input data. This awareness has led many officers to develop a sceptical attitude towards predictive technologies and, in a few cases, these officers have expressed a reluctance to use predictive technologies. Based on these findings, this paper argues that claims about predictive software's ability to neutralise the subjectivity of police work overlooks the ongoing struggles of the police officer to assert their agency and mediate the extent to which predictions will be trusted and utilised.

This article considers the transferability of sporting mega-event strategies across time and place. In doing so, it presents a number of arguments highlighting the progressive global standardization of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies comprising continually reproduced security leitmotifs. Such orthodoxies are drawn from a range of experiences at both sporting and non-sporting mega-events. By contrast to these globalized models, the terrorist threats they seek to counter are almost always rooted in diverse local settings. This convergence of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies does not simply represent an uncritical imposition of an external framework of security, however. Instead, this article identifies and interrogates how sporting mega-event security planning is also tempered by a range of localized processes, including vernacular cultures of security and the scale of extant security infrastructures.

This article analyses adoptions of innovative technology into police surveillance activities. Extending the nascent body of empirical research on digital policing, the article draws on qualitative interview data of operational police uses of advanced surveillance technologies. Separate illustrative examples are drawn from social media intelligence gathering, digital forensics and covert online child sexual exploitation investigations. Here, surveillance governance mechanisms, often authored in the ‘pre-digital’ era, are deemed ill-fitting to the possibilities brought by new technologies. This generates new spaces of interpretation, where regulatory frameworks become renegotiated and reinterpreted, a process defined here as ‘surveillance arbitration’. These deliberations are resolved in myriad ways, including perceived licence for extended surveillance and, conversely, more cautious approaches motivated by perceived exposure to regulatory sanction.