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Policing legitimacy: social media, scandal and sexual citizenship

The global emergence of new digital technologies during the late 2000s and early 2010s has had a profound effect on relations between the police, the mass media and the public. These new technologies have enabled the police to communicate more directly with the public than ever before, without the intervention of the mainstream media, and increased their powers of surveillance. At the same time, these technologies have provided the public and the press with greater capacity to monitor the police. In the past, the only way members of the public could bring video footage of police brutality to the attention of a wider audience was by handing that footage over to mainstream media outlets. Now, digital platforms allow members of the public to bypass the media and post footage themselves in real time on YouTube and Facebook – a recent example being the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which triggered worldwide demonstrations and protest. Justin Ellis’s first book, Policing Legitimacy, Social Media and Sexual Citizenship, provides a detailed and nuanced account of the context and impact of digital media technologies on public order policing and citizen resistance through ‘sousveillance’ (Mann et al. 2003). Ellis is an authority in this field and has published widely on the impact of digital media technologies on trust in public institutions and on relations between the police, the media and the public. His excellent and thought-provoking new book builds on scholarship into pre-digital police scandals such as the beating of Rodney King by LAPD police officers and, more recently, partially social media generated police scandals such as the Robert Dziekanski case in Vancouver in 2007 and the Ian Tomlinson case in London in 2009 (Goldsmith 2010, Greer and McLaughlin 2010). Additionally, it contributes to the growing body of work on public protest through social media, particularly by marginalised or oppressed communities, most notably the recent work by Richardson (2020) documenting how Black Americans are using smartphones to create video evidence for each other, in cases of excessive police force. Ellis asks two key questions in his book: how does social media affect negotiations of police legitimacy and what factors might contribute to fluctuations in police legitimacy over time? In answer to the first question, he introduces the concept of what he terms ‘the social media test’ (p. 2) or the evaluation of police actions and accountability through social media representations. As one of his police interviewees notes: