Editorial: Visibilities and New Models of Policing

Spiller, Keith; L’Hoiry, Xavier

doi:10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13239

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…More recently, police departments have also discovered the internet as a communication channel toward the public, and they have started using social media platforms for PR strategies (Spiller and L'Hoiry, 2019;Walsh and O'Connor, 2019) and to render their activities more effective and efficient (de Graaf and Meijer, 2019). Although research suggests that PR and social media work are often organizationally separated from operational parts within police departments and are thus more political than issue driven (Crump, 2011), social media enables police departments to communicate with their target audience directly and disseminate information that can include such things as missing person reports, a search for witnesses, or traffic disruptions.…”

Section: Risk and The Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criminal Futures

Egbert¹,

Leese²

2020

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This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices. The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work. Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

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Section: Risk and The Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criminal Futures

Egbert¹,

Leese²

2020

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“…These changes and characteristics have implications for how the police and public, private, and voluntary sector partners interact in policing strategies (see Spiller and L'Hoiry 2019;Trottier 2015). Furthermore, they entail both myriad potentials as well as possible risks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Govern Visibility?: Legitimizations and Contestations of Visual Data Practices after the 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg

Venema

2020

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Technological changes shift how visibility can be established, governed, and used. Ubiquitous visual technologies, the possibility to distribute and use images from heterogeneous sources across different social contexts and publics, and increasingly powerful facial recognition tools afford new avenues for law enforcement. Concurrently, these changes also trigger fundamental concerns about privacy violations and all-encompassing surveillance. Using the example of police investigations after the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, the present article provides insights into how different actors in the political and public realm in Germany deal with these potentials and tensions in handling visual data. Based on a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles (n=42), tweets (n=267), experts’ reports (n=3), and minutes of parliamentary debates and committee hearings (n=8), this study examines how visual data were collected, analyzed, and published and how different actors legitimated and contested these practices. The findings show that combined state, corporate, and privately produced visual data and the use of facial recognition tools allowed the police to cover and track public life in large parts of the inner city of Hamburg during the summit days. Police authorities characterized visual data and algorithmic tools as objective, trustworthy, and indispensable evidence-providing tools but black-boxed the heterogeneity of sources, the analytical steps, and their potential implications. Critics, in turn, expressed concerns about infringements of civic rights, the trustworthiness of police authorities, and the extensive police surveillance capacities. Based on these findings, this article discusses three topics that remained blind spots in the debates but merit further attention in discussions on norms for visual data management and for governing visibility: (1) collective responsibilities in visibility management, (2) trust in visual data and facial recognition technologies, and (3) social consequences of encompassing visual data collection and registered faceprints.

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