Managing Suspicion and Privacy in Police Information Systems

Over the past several decades and especially in the past decade, a broad trend in the world of policing has been the move toward more preventive and proactive styles. Beginning as a way to increase police legitimacy (Tilley 2003), community policing promotes stronger relations between police and communities to develop a greater flow of information about crime problems and aims to cultivate an ethos of policing as a public service. Although widely adopted, community policing coexists in practice with other managerial strategies (Tilley 2009). One of these, CompStat, is a multilayered approach characterized by both setting an organizational mechanism for officer accountability and placing at its core geographic information systems (GIS) for crime mapping and analysis. In this lineage of policing managerial philosophies, spreading gradually and developing incrementally, a constant has been the increasing employment of data gathering and analysis and the promotion of intelligence sharing as key elements in efficient resource allocation and strategies of crime control (Ratcliffe 2008). In the European Union, this trend can be seen both in the promotion of new security technologies (i.e. multiple security research projects within EU FP7) as well as in the security strategy policies. On one hand, identifying the cross-sectorial nature of threats calls for strengthened cooperation and coordination between European