Strategic workshop on digital policing: challenging harmful practices and planning for safety
This blog was co-written by Oyidiya Oji from European Network Against Racism and Laurence Meyer, Co-director of Weaving Liberation.
On 7 and 8 May 2024, Weaving Liberation and the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) joined forces to organise a strategic workshop on digital policing. More than 20 community organisers, lawyers, racial and social justice and digital rights organisations gathered in Hastières, Belgium, with the aim of addressing the disproportionate negative impact of use of technology by law enforcement on racialised and marginalised communities. Over the two days, a space was provided to share knowledge, organise collectively and find support whilst resisting digital policing across Europe.
Planned as a retreat in the countryside, allowing people to disconnect from the everyday grind and regenerate in a wholesome environment, we designed an agenda that could encapsulate the expertise of the attendees and provide room to foster collective resistance and solidarity. We aimed to understand better how to work together and leverage the power of strategic litigation, coalition-building and community-organising as a tool to support affected communities.
We gathered a unique group of organisations that supported the exchange of ideas, strategies and recommendations on how to move towards a better awareness of the digital policing landscape across Europe focusing on how it concretely affects marginalised communities and especially racialised people. We heard from organisations such as Ghett’up, La Quadrature du Net from France, StraLi in Italy, Kids of Colour and Liberty from the U.K., Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte from Germany, Center for Danish Muslim Relations (CEDA) from Denmark, Iridia from Spain, and pan-European groups such as Romnja Feminist Library, Equinox, Justice, Equity and Technology table and EDRi. We learned from different collectives and movements as well as strategised about how this knowledge can inform our next steps and actions.
Many underlined what matters when strategising across movements:
– Placing the impacts of technological harms within a larger understanding of harmful policing practices: the harms of digital policing are part of a larger issue and need to be addressed as such.
– Understanding that digital policing cannot be challenged using only one instrument: to build strong litigation cases that change the situation for the impacted communities, you need to do community-work which can mean organising cultural events to bring about joy, educational programmes, legal counselling, intervention training, etc.
– Having a strong common and transformative vision of what safety can look like beyond digital policing is key to proposing amendments, litigation strategies and/or advocacy that are future-proof and coherent from files to files,from one to another.
– Building capacity to mobilise non-discrimination law frameworks when challenging digital policing is crucially needed.
– Language justice is critical to building a robust idea of the different perspectives in terms of expertise, lived experiences, and values.
The gathering allowed the group to share their current work and learnings about what has worked in their specific cases and how they did it. It was also a space to start talking about next steps- notably, regarding the upcoming implementation of the AI Act and the Migration pact.
The participants highlighted how important and rare such spaces are, with many meeting for the first time and being fully invested in connecting with one another during those two days. They also underlined the importance of continuing to map and question who should be part of these discussions and who can add additional value in terms of expertise from other geographies, communities and types of knowledge and practice. Many topics were impossible to cover in the two days but the gathering opened the door to set up further channels of communication and knowledge exchange, which were planned during the next-step sessions.
We are committed to continue this crucial work of offering strategising spaces to enable new connections, common visions and shared plans to emerge to challenge harmful use of technologies in law enforcement contexts. We are looking forward to seeing the fruits of the promising next steps formulated during those days!
