Policing in a Digital Age: Legality vs Legitimacy
Centre for Irish and European Security Director Sadhbh McCarthy will be introducing “Policing in a Digital Age: Legality vs Legitimacy”, a thematic track available through the afternoon. Dr. Pete Fussey, Dr. Mark Maguire, and Alan Kearney will also be appearing in this track.
Policing, Social Media and Communications Strategy
The Policing and Technology track will launch with Sadhbh McCarthy presenting on the bilateral complexity of social media as a tool for policing and the use of citizens as sensors, and the inherent perils and opportunities around this emerging practice. Sadhbh McCarthy will argue that implementing a communication strategy needs to be a binding prerequisite to police engagement with social media. Open source social media data, unlike CCTV images, extends the power of the state beyond surveillance of citizens towards one that can actively gather and elicit information – and as such is a bilateral communication tool. Sadhbh will illustrate that failure to recognise that using social media as a shortcut policing tool, without an adequate strategy for communication and the use of Social Media data mining for intelligence gathering, may not only be ineffective, but can have long-lasting negative effects on the relationships of police forces and the communities they serve.
