Technology-informed protest management practices: an empirical look into Belgian police command posts

• In Event: POL Panel 17. The use of technology in law enforcement: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

The use of internet sources by protesters has several implications for public order policing, as mobilisations scale up more quickly and the crowds are more likely to take the form of non-hierarchical structures and unstable relations (Tarafdar & Ray, 2021). Partly in response to these changes, the police have adopted technologies to try and ‘reboot’ their public order policing: CCTV, body-worn cameras, drones, facial recognition technology, automatic number plate recognition and phone tracking. Criminological research until now has focused on the emergence of protests or on the risks of those technologies (e.g. privacy, discrimination and freedom of movement concerns). The way in which command posts operators (e.g. police executives, dispatchers, and government officials) manage such (mediatised) protests and the role played by technologies in those practices of protest management, however, has remained understudied. This study will address these gaps by an empirical research consisting of case studies of Belgian protests. Those case studies will be analysed using the crisis management framework of Boin et al. (2016). Specifically, the study aims to understand how command post operators implement the five tasks of ‘sense-making’, ‘decision-making’, ‘meaning-making’, ‘ending and accountability’ and ‘learning’, and what role technologies play in those practices. To this end, the case studies will combine interviews, observations in the command post and document analysis.

Author

• Donatella Van Biervliet, KU Leuven