Digital Media and Public Accountability in the Policing of Brazil's Favelas

The advent of the world-wide web in 1989 captured public imagination through the possibility of communicating with ever-wider audiences. Initially, this process involved the dissemination of information in public domains, but the later development of Web 2.0 emerged in services that are always available, to which we are always connected, and through which we are able to produce as well as consume knowledge. The initial period following the emergence of the digital society saw law enforcement practitioners, and academic criminologists, respond reactively to digital crime and criminality. Both have adopted a dominant approach to digital media that is a one-way flow of information: either providing information to a passive audience or taking information from an identified target. It is much more recent that either group have begun to utilise digital media to construct dialogues with the publics they serve. The true value of digital technologies remains unrealised, particularly when considering the emphasis within democratic policing on the key principles of transparency and accountability to the public.

The exploratory discussion in this chapter is underpinned by a critical literature review, adding to the developing scholarly discussion about digital criminology by examining the value of new media as a tool of public accountability. The chapter seeks to examine how the process of truth-telling in post-transitional states can be augmented by the use of social media and how this might impact on the democratic priority that policing agencies are transparent and held accountable for past and present abuses of power. Digital media, and the counterpublics who emerge from such spaces, have the potential to deliver citizen journalism that recognises the position of individuals within narratives of oppression and identifies opportunities for public, participatory accountability without the need to mediate their message through formal, legal mechanisms or mainstream media outlets. Hashtag activism, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #nuncamais, and #ditaduranão, has the potential to mobilise new participants in the act of public accountability. Each act of public truth-telling reaffirms the credentials of politically engaged users as digital activists, which non-engaged users can witness and distribute across their own social network.