Disgracebook policing: social media and the rise of police indiscretion

Abstract

This paper examines the problems for police reputation, operational effectiveness and integrity of the criminal justice system that can arise from off-duty use of social media (SM) by police officers. It locates recent trends in SM use against the background of changes in information and communication practices in policing and the wider community. The concept of police indiscretion is used to explore those features of SM that facilitate and encourage disclosures as well as to, using a series of case studies, identify the harms that can arise. It is suggested that there is currently insufficient appreciation of how SM is impacting upon policing and that, in contrast to the impacts of previous new technologies, SM has the potential to transform many policing practices more quickly and in a more wholesale fashion. Some suggestions for responding to this scenario are offered.

Crime and Justice in Digital Society: Towards a ‘Digital Criminology’?

“…Our intention is to foster a broader and ongoing conversation within the discipline that cuts across technology, sociality, crime, deviance and justice; and to inspire new conceptual and empirical directions. in 1984, can be differentiated from the centralised, stationary and ponderous early computers (see Goldberg 1988). These personal computing workstations were also among the first to use a graphical user interface, which did not require specific knowledge of command-line programming, and thus radically opened up computing to individual users both through portability and ease of use (Goldberg 1988).…”

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“…This combination of conditions has consequences for policing. It has created a 'new visibility' (Goldsmith, 2010) in which formerly hidden behaviours can become 'axial media events' (Manning, 1996) and new behaviours in social media have potentially scandalous outcomes (Goldsmith, 2015). It has also elevated the public profiles of police leaders in ways that were unimaginable two decades ago (Blair 2009: 116-7, 135-6;Greer and McLaughlin 2012a/b) as the case study below demonstrates.…”

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