Inside the Digital Revolution

Policing and Changing Communication with the Public

Bridgette Wessels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754670872
• eBook ISBN: 9781317116103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this work, Bridgette Wessels offers a unique insight into the ways in which core public institutions and powerful organizations develop digital communications and services within the public realm. The book draws on her ethnographic research with the London Metropolitan Police Service during their engagement in an innovative project to improve communication with the public using digital technology. As one of the largest, most advanced and highly respected police services in the world, working in a socially, culturally and demographically complex city, the Metropolitan Police Service offers a highly revealing case study of technology and the human processes which it is designed to serve. The ethnographic research is used to develop a new theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between social action and technological change, addressing the way in which technology is socially shaped and culturally informed. The book also discusses the role of ethnography as a tool for researching complex multi-perspective, multi-sited networks of the innovation of digital technologies as forms of communication in late modern western society.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Context of Changing Communication with the Public using Digital Technologies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315588742-1

The police is a key institution within society and represents the civil body politic in everyday life. It is uniquely situated in that it has to maintain an acceptable level of social order within the contradictions of society and during any periods of social change. Contemporary society is becoming increasingly mediated and informational through the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICT). This trend is often hailed as a ‘revolution’ in which digital technologies underpin transformations to a new society (Negroponte 1998; Rheingold 1993). This society is often described as an information society or networked society involving what is variously termed a new economy or knowledge economy (Webster 2004; Castells 2001; Mansell and Steinmueller 2000). There is debate, however, as to the precise character of this ‘revolution’ – whether there is a radical change in society or evolutionary incremental change, and, what the character as well as consequences of any change is (Harrison and Wessels, 2005). Nonetheless, the rise of networks as a main organisational form in economic and social life is evident (Castells, 2001) and this organizational form is particularly adaptable for the needs of global markets within the current neo-liberal consensus and modus operandi. In alignment with these changes is the rise of global cities which act as nodes within the networked economy (Castells 2001; Graham 2004).

These broad socio-economic and political changes materialize in specific social consequences such as new forms of social exclusion within neo-liberal economies (Steinert and Pilgram (eds.) 2007; Taylor, Evans and Fraser, 1999), which can result in fragmented cities (Graham and Marvin 1996, 2001) and in exclusion through ‘digital divides’ (Norris 2000). Change also materializes within particular organisational contexts such as the development of flexible patterns of work as well as changes to organisations themselves (Cornford and Pollock 2003; McLoughlin 1999). An overarching characteristic of the dimensions of socio-technical change is that they involve institutional change (Mansell and Silverstone (eds) 1996). As mentioned above, one key institution within contemporary societies is the police. Some police services have specific responsibility for policing a global city such as, for example, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The work of the police places it directly within contradictions of contemporary societies in which crime, deprivation and poverty interact to produce various situations of social exclusion that are experienced at the local level. This contexts prompts the question: how is a public institution such as the police developing digital services for communicating with diverse publics in complex global cities? This book explores the ways in which the MPS, in collaboration with the London Borough of Newham in a European consortium, developed digital technology to change communication with the public.

In general terms, institutions are embedded in our notions of what it means to be a citizen in complex contemporary society. Institutions that play a role in modern civil society include the police and local government. The police seek to maintain order and to ensure the security of individuals and groups, and the role of local government is to facilitate local democracy and provide local services. Each organization provides services and constitutes a part of the civil body politic since together they embody the civil, political and social rights of citizenship. As a basic premise, it is reasonable to state that human society is based on symbolic communication (Manning 1977), that all modern institutions are communication-dependent, and that those which serve the public must channel and mediate limited resources to meet citizens’ demands. Policing exists in a symbiotic relationship with the societies it polices (Hobbs 1989) and the police service faces changes to its practices in relation to changing social expectations and social trends. The police are part of the network of state institutions that work to ensure the safety and security of members of society through maintaining order. Although they have a unique role to play in society, they do not work in isolation. Issues of disorder and unrest, domestic violence, burglary and so on are complex phenomena and the police service works with other public agencies to achieve a sense of security for members of society, which requires it to communicate with members of the public and with other agencies in order to carry out its business.

The communication problem faced by the police is how to anticipate, respond to, mediate, and prioritize citizens’ demands within a controlled and calculated strategy. Effective policing is based on complex human and technological communications systems and on the communications skills of its officers. The police service also provides an entry point to the judicial system and to a variety of social and emergency services. The police organization is structured to deploy officers in a time/space matrix. They routinely intervene and intrude in private spaces, prompted by a variety of motivating events. When they act, they must, for the most part, rely on information, co-operation and goodwill from citizens in order to accomplish their defined tasks.

There are various political interpretations, from within various Right and Left positions, as to how the police-public relationship should be defined and practised. Whatever political interpretation is proposed there remains, nonetheless, a need for the police and public to communicate with each other to ensure a reasonable level of order and safety. Interpretations of ways of controlling crime and disorder evolve through a practical working relationship between the police, local authorities and local neighbourhoods. This places the police’s communication problem within a unique frame – how do the police communicate with the diversity of groups that can inhabit a single neighbourhood? How do they do this in a resource environment that is generally ambiguous about the priorities and efficiency criteria of public-police communications? How do the police communicate and work with other local services to fulfil the complexity of citizens’ needs? The diversity of demands made on the police makes defining ‘police work’ difficult (c.f. Manning 1977; Holdaway 1983; Hobbs 1989).

The issues of communication and access cannot be divorced from the issue of service provision itself. The development and use of digital technology is wide-ranging, covering areas in the public sector such as e-learning, e-health, e-government, and e-services. The development of these technologies involves change in terms of the ‘back office’ functions, i.e. internal organizational change as well as change to the organization’s public interface and participation with the public (Cornford et al. 2004). The MPS and other public sector organizations were interested in ‘telematics’ based on digital technologies because it sought to develop digital public interfaces and e-services, and subsequent developments in e-services are continuing to build on the ideas embedded within telematics. It is important to distinguish between ‘multimedia’ – essentially a configuration of different digital technologies – and ‘telematics’, a term that refers to a specific kind of service environment employing digital technologies. Thus, multimedia is defined as a technology whose general characteristics are:

• digital,
• convergent, involving computers and communication technologies,
• involving a combination of video, sound and text,
• possibly involving video conferencing, scanning, interactive tracking and smart card technologies, touch screens etc., and
• requiring content to be interpolated from it: i.e., it has no intrinsic content or context of its own.

The term ‘telematics’ developed out of a need to describe the specific context of the integration of ICT to deliver new kinds of services electronically, and is defined in this book as:

• involving the use of multimedia technologies to deliver various services.

The factors that contribute to the contextual definitions are:

• the ability of various organizations to provide access to information and services for the public via information and communication technologies,
• the promise of which is an enhanced service for the public.

This book focuses on how public institutions such as the police create new forms of technically-mediated access to public services and information about services, in an environment that can be critical in terms of life, property and public safety. It examines issues involved in the processes of developing digital technologies and telematics services in settings that involve a public interface. The complexity of the field means that the focus is both more than and less than a particular technology. The development of public applications of technologies involves not only considering new configurations of technology, but also the social and symbolic aspects of services in relation to citizens’ lives and perceptions. It thus situates the creation of new technological applications in an arena of changing social expectations and cultural trends.

The significance of this point is both theoretical and practical. In theoretical terms, the study addresses the complexity of the dynamic link between technical applications and human culture in order to understand how technologies are socially-shaped and culturally-informed (Castells 2001). In practical terms, digital applications and services must be reliable in life-critical situations, and accessible to all members of the public. Failures can have serious consequences because death, serious injury or injustice may occur if an application is unreliable. Furthermore, if an application is not accessible, it denies people access to services. The focus of this book is the innovative ways in which the police and other public services form partnerships to change communication with the public.

Generally, the term ‘innovation’ is used to denote a change that requires a significant amount of imagination, represents a relatively sharp break with established ways of doing things, and creates a new capability of some kind. But innovation is a matter of degree, and in Schumpeter’s (1934) terms, innovation results in the establishment of a new production function – a change in the set of possibilities that defines what can be produced and how. It is important to distinguish between the conception of a new product or means of production – an invention – and the practical implementation of that conception. In most of the literature the term ‘innovation’ is reserved for the second of these two stages.

The ways in which the police aim to change their forms of communication with the public can be understood as ‘ICT innovation’, which refers to the development of new applications involving new configurations of ICT – some existing, some still in development. In other words, ‘ICT innovation’ refers to the process of developing a new kind of telematics service in an environment of general communications between citizens and public services, involving access to information, advice and assistance. The digital technologies need to be embedded within service provision, and in turn, services may need to be modified in relation to the technological means of access. Thus, there may be changes in service provision and changes in technological means of service provision to provide new forms of service provision.

The Context of the Ethnography

The Metropolitan Police wanted to ascertain how digital technology could enhance their services and communication with the public in order to control crime and to develop and sustain safer communities. At the same time, developments under the European Union’s Research and Development Frameworks were starting to address the ways in which digital technology could be used in public services. The focus on applications for digital technology began predominately in the mid-1990s under the EU Fourth Framework programmes and continue to date in the various ‘eEurope’ developments and into the future for service transformation by 2010 (Wessels forthcoming).

One of the main projects in the MPS Digital Programme was a EU project called ‘Advanced TransEuropean Telematics Applications for Community Help’ (ATTACH), which involved partners from London Borough of Newham (LBN), Central Scotland Police, Roosendaal, Stichting Transparent (NL), Ronneby City Council (SWE), Thessaloniki, TRD (GRE), Cete Mediterranee, Olivetti (UK), and CCD (UK).

The ATTACH project’s ‘official’ statement said that it would:

…develop, implement and demonstrate interactive multimedia kiosks for self-service use of citizens providing information about and interaction with local administrations, police and local organizations including emergency and video services. Special applications are developed for ethnic minorities and deaf people. ATTACH will exchange information with other local authorities and provide a guide to implementing self-service multimedia applications.

The MPS is one of the largest police services in the world and is responsible for policing metropolitan London areas with a population of over eight million. The geographical area is approximately 4,000 km², comprising 32 independent boroughs, each with its own municipal government. Policing the capital involves many challenges and many unique responsibilities. The MPS deals with all the usual criminal and public order matters, but also with events that are unique to a capital city. It must ensure security at ceremonial occasions in London and is responsible for the protection of the Royal Family, Parliament and the city’s diplomatic communities. The demands of policing London are great: London’s population has become increasingly diverse, there are myriad demands on resources and the public has high expectations of the MPS.

The key expectations that the public has of the MPS are to:

• tackle crime effectively,
• provide patrolling officers to reassure and improve their quality of life, and
• respond well to emergency calls.

The core of the MPS’s work is delivering these services in a way that is fair and professional and is seen to provide value for money. The MPS perceives that crime can be tackled successfully with the support of the public. It relies on effective partnerships in all aspects of policing, whether within the criminal justice system, with car manufacturers in the prevention of car crime, or with voluntary groups in the care of victims. There are 27,000 police officers and 15,000 civilian support staff in the MPS, and the service attends over 3.5 million incidents each year. A total of 778,041 crimes were recorded in 1997–8 (Historical SUMMIT). There were 1,875,381 emergency ‘999’ calls (1997–8), which are taken through New Scotland Yard (NSY). Calls to control rooms, crime desks and criminal justice units over the same period totalled 6,849,710, and there were 4,470,449 calls via switching centres.

The Department of Technology (DOT) is responsible for developing, implementing and supporting the technological requirements of the MPS. It is comprised of many branches which address the complex task of providing a vast array of technical applications for the requirements of policing. Examples include CRIS, a crime reporting information system, the central 999 call-centre at New Scotland Yard (NSY) and OTIS, an office information system, amongst others. The DOT has 1,800 staff. The MPS has an annual turnover of £2 billion, and the DOT’s portion of this is £100 million per year, of which the ATTACH budget was a mere £100,000 per year.

CARAT (Centre for Applied Research and Technology) is a research centre in the Innovation and Enabling Branch of the DOT. The aims of CARAT are:

• to encourage and foster innovation, led by the needs and suggestions of police officers in the MPS,
• to match parti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figure
• List of Acronyms
• List of Pseudonyms
• Technical Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Context of Changing Communication with the Public using Digital Technologies
• 2 The Problem of Defining ‘Project Digital’: Making Sense of Digital Technologies in Police Service Environments
• 3 The Cultural Dynamics of Technological Change
• 4 Putting the Researcher in the Field: The Performances and Positions of the Ethnographer in Innovative Networks of Communication
• 5 The Cultural History of Programme Digital and Project ATTACH in the MPS
• 6 Phase One of the Relations of Production: ‘Kicking-off and the Early Days’
• 7 Phase Two of the Relations of Production: ‘Moving on and Developing e-Services’
• 8 The Construction of a Digital Services Narrative at European, National and Regional Levels
• 9 Narratives of Service Provision in the Metropolitan Police Service: Embedding Telematics within Service Narratives
• 10 Participation between Service Providers and Residents: Local People's Perceptions of Services in the East End of London
• 11 Police Work and Everyday Life
• 12 Conclusion
• Appendix: The Research Methods and Objectives of Newham Focus Groups
• Bibliography
• Index