DIGIPOL

Digitalizing the police: internal and external challenges for the police organization in an inclusive society

 

Policing is experiencing rapid transformation whereby contemporary daily police work and encounters with citizens (external), but also with other police officers and superior (internal), are increasingly mediated by technology. Motivated by efficiency and objective outputs, that trend leaves the question of its impact on more discrete outcomes associated to frontline police work unanswered.

The DIGIPOL research aims to study how the process of digitalisation through technologies such as body-worn cameras, Mobile Data Terminals and multi-tenant platforms for front line police work, as well as analysis software’s, affects the everyday work of the Belgian local police. Moreover, it aims to gain insight in how the emergence of technology in the police organization changes the workplace and working conditions, the internal working relationships and police-public relations. Particular attention will be put on how technology should contribute to police’s efficiency on one hand and police legitimacy on the other. Within an inclusive society police-public relationships are important breeding-grounds for trust in state and police trust. The project questions how the expansion of technology-mediated interactions affects organizational legitimacy as well as police legitimacy as a whole.

 

Project BRAIN-be (Belgian Research Action through Interdisciplinary Networks) funded by BELSPO - Belgian Science Policy

This project brings together researchers from the NICC (coordinator), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

 

 

Police, Procedural Justice, Digital Technologies , Organisational Justice, Legitimacy