Abstract
Given our typically fiery and chaotic social media landscape, characterized by a glut of information and persistent discord, Justin Ellis’ book is a timely and useful look at how digital technologies have impacted the image of policing, particularly as seen through the lens of the LGBTQI community. Ellis’ Policing Legitimacy: Social Media, Scandal and Sexual Citizenship is part of Springer’s Crime and Justice in Digital Society series devoted to the study of how digital technologies are reshaping our understandings and experiences of social harm, crime, justice, and social control. A welcome contribution to the series, the book is a sophisticated approach to crime media research. It acknowledges the dynamics of police image work, public discourse around policing, and the relationship between police and community organizations.
With a focus on New South Wales, Australia (NSW), Ellis cites the bystander video of the NSW police arresting a teenager named Jamie Jackson Reed during the 2013 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. He harnesses that example to illustrate how digital technologies have altered not just the nature of surveillance, but also the contours of police legitimacy. The video shows Reed, an attendee of the festival, “kicking out” and being “. . .forcibly thrown to the ground by the police officer” before his arrest for assaulting police and resisting arrest (p. 3). Ellis uses this incident of police violence, caught on camera, as a contemporary example of how bystander videos, and their perpetual digital presence, evoke unresolved tensions between police and the LGBTQI community.
The book lays out the social, cultural, and political significance of sousveillance and its impact on the public’s demand that police justify their actions. Ellis’ major contribution here is detailing what he describes as the “social media test,” a “credibility test of police culture,” where contestation of truth claims perpetually cycle through the multi-media landscape, demanding institutional response, and requiring constant renewal of legitimacy. Ellis homes in on how the LGBTQI community responded to the bystander video and engaged with the police in the aftermath. He describes the response of organizations and allies as rooted in the historically fraught relationship between the police and the LGBTQI community. Ellis also interrogates the usefulness of the sexual citizenship framework—that is, what scholar Richardson (2017) sees as “the significance of sexuality to citizenship.” Here, the book contributes to digiqueer criminology—what Ellis describe as the social and digital impact on LGBTQI folks in the criminal justice context—in that it examines the possibilities of using digital technologies in the pursuit of justice for LGBTQI and other marginalized communities.
As scholars have noted, policing itself is inextricably bound up in media. Police are fully invested in controlling the narrative through image work—the curated ways police craft their own image (Lee and McGovern, 2014; Mawby, 2014). Through media analysis, interviews with police employees and non-police stakeholders, as well as via an online survey of LGBTQI social media users and allies, Ellis captures how digital technologies have the capacity to rupture the police organization’s ability to control the narrative of police violence. This multi-methods approach adds qualitative depth and nuance to the complex social phenomenon of how police violence is portrayed in media, how it is received by audiences, and how police legitimacy is challenged or reinforced through digital technologies.
Ellis explores how digital technologies have shifted the parameters around how police use of force is negotiated and contested. The importance here is not just that there are competing narratives, but that the legitimacy of policing hinges on the ability for police to justify their behavior. In a digital environment, legitimacy is largely maintained through the ubiquitous presence of online image-management techniques and strategies. Ellis shows, however, how this “reservoir of good will” can be depleted by the presence of a viral video that sparks ongoing demands for police to justify their behavior (p. 48). Here, Ellis’ concept of “dynamic legitimacy”—how digital technologies facilitate the sharing and viewing of video content that, in turn, increases the need for police to justify their behavior “. . .through a potentially infinite claim-response dialogue”—is useful in understanding what is considered legitimate use of force and how the flow of discourse through digital technologies is significant to those determinations (p. 47). Judgments on the use of force often rest on whether it is sufficiently justified. In light of this, Ellis suggests that focusing exclusively on the legality of police conduct obscures how the social meaning of police brutality transcends any given rules or regulations that prohibit it. As Ellis states, “. . .senior police are aware that evaluations of police proportionality are more likely to be based on the aesthetics of what a situation might ‘look like’, rather than the legal parameters of police procedure or civilian culpability” (pp. 45–46).
Ellis reports that in this scenario, digital technologies serve a corroborative function for complainants and provide some pressure on police to justify their behaviors. Meaningful, institutional accountability, however, remains elusive. Drawing on prior scholarship, Ellis applies Rob Mawby’s conceptual model of scandal to the Reed incident, showing how the video footage prompted public outrage, surprise reactions by police, internal investigations, and various civil actions. Ellis found, however, that the internal investigations initiated by police neither improved perceptions of them nor functioned as a mechanism of accountability. Instead, the non-disclosure practices that followed internal investigations, kept complainants in the dark regarding case outcomes. The danger here, as Ellis sees it, is that of chronic scandal where new scandals invoke prior unresolved scandals, leading to further public dissatisfaction and a perpetual scandal-and-reform cycle.
The book is a welcome contribution to the study of policing, social media, and the role of sexual citizenship. While it is most geared toward Australian audiences, international readers will find the research relevant. For scholars, the book is most useful for providing concepts that may be extracted and expanded on in further research at the intersection of digital and queer criminology. For example, Ellis describes the tension between police and the LGBTQI community as “conflicted intimacy.” He says this ambivalence exists because even as police engage in inclusion and diversity programs, community initiatives, and outreach, those efforts are undercut by public order policing practices that conflict with, and produce harm in, the LGBTQI community. The data Ellis presents reveal some support for the notion that less policing would go a long way to reduce harm against marginalized communities. In the aftermath of far-too-many instances of police brutality and the emergence of widespread Black Lives Matter protests in America, the absence of discourse around defunding and/or abolishing the police seem notable. Given our heightened scrutiny of policing in a larger cultural context, Ellis’ study is particularly timely and worthwhile.