Drone Policing A realist case study of police technological innovation

Recent years have witnessed a rapid expansion in the use of unmanned aerial systems (commonly referred to as drones) amongst constabularies across England and Wales. New and emerging potentials have been lauded amongst drone advocates, pointing to the many ways in which drones can augment and assist in a range of policing functions. These include, but are not limited to, crime scene investigations, public events monitoring, operational planning, search-and-rescue, and intelligence/evidence gathering. Critical social science has tended toward registering drone technology in terms of panoptic power; ‘always on’ surveillance which jeopardises privacy and civil liberties within domestic liberal democratic societies. An alternative register of drone policing is advanced in this thesis which challenges such unilateral accounts. Drone policing is instead understood as a socio-technical system which permits analysis of the ways in which drones shape and are shaped by policing. This realist conception compels empirical investigation into drone policing in action (as opposed to in thought). This case study exposes the human relations which enable and constrain drone policing, including localised regulation and parochialism, human error, technical malfunctions, and evangelism and resistance amongst police officers. These factors run alongside the conditions of the natural world – such as adverse weather and ferromagnetic interference – as well as the material world – as the UK grapples with widespread drone proliferation – which police drones are deployed into. Consequently, drone policing is reconceptualised in line with the context-mechanism-outcome pattern configurations symbolic of realist evaluations of policing programmes; the mechanisms which produce drone policing relate to diverse contexts. This thesis suggests that empirical study of drone policing in action can problematise hitherto teleological accounts of drone policing and generate the conceptual armature for future research and speculation about police relations with emergent technology

Islamophobia and Twitter: A Typology of Online Hate Against Muslims on Social Media

The Woolwich attack in May 2013 has led to a spate of hate crimes committed against Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. These incidents include Muslim women being targeted for wearing the headscarf and mosques being vandalized. While street level Islamophobia remains an important area of investigation, an equally disturbing picture is emerging with the rise in online anti-Muslim abuse. This article argues that online Islamophobia must be given the same level of attention as street level Islamophobia. It examines 500 tweets from 100 different Twitter users to examine how Muslims are being viewed and targeted by perpetrators of online abuse via the Twitter search engine, and offers a typology of offender characteristics

‘That’s their brand, their business’: How police officers are interpreting County Lines

A recent development in drug markets across England and Wales garnering increased attention is the phenomenon of ‘County Lines’. This involves drug supply groups migrating from major cities to smaller towns, and has become associated with a range of harms including violence and the exploitation of vulnerable populations. Drawing on interviews with police officers of various ranks tasked with responding to County Lines, this article explores how they are interpreting this emergent phenomenon. A framework of profit maximisation was constructed by all of the participants, and was used as a way to understand and explain some of the key characteristics and activities associated with County Lines groups. Congruent with this, participants also stressed these group’s similarities to legitimate business and how they adopted conventional business strategies such as marketing. The article concludes by discussing the utility of this profit maximisation framework, how it relates to police responses and areas worthy of further research