Digitalization is changing practices of social control and policing in cities and neighborhoods. New technologies such as smartphones, apps, social media, sensors or algorithms reshape police practices in the urban arena and reconfigure the interface between physical and digital spaces in police work. Moreover, digitalization facilitates and decentralizes law enforcement actions and order maintenance policing in a manner that involves new actors. Moreover, digitalization promotes new modes of representation, communication and interaction which challenge police, and introduce new spaces for negotiation that transform police-community relations. Therefore, urban policing in the digital age produces a multitude of new dilemmas and topics concerning social issues, questions of justice and inequality, geography, media, and politics. The aim of the workshop is to gather researchers from various disciplines to discuss the broad question of how processes of digitalization reshape policing and social order in cities and neighborhoods.
Key questions or problems:
How do processes of digitalization reshape policing and social order in cities and neighborhoods?
How does it affect different populations and groups in the city and different spaces in the city?
How does it re-configure the relationship between the physical and the digital spaces in policing ?
Finally, how does policing in the digital age affect the social order, power relations and inequalities in our contemporary cities?
Format, methods and/or data:
Each participant uses his own data and methods, overall the group includes diverse methods.
Output:
We are aiming to produce a joint publication in the format of a special issue in an international academic journal. Moreover, we also aim to publish a short article to the general public and the professional community of police organizations.
Research Topics
- Urban policing
- Predictive policing
- Digitalisation
- Smart Cities
- Neighborhood