In this article, the author reflects on the impact of COVID-19 on policing, the relations among police officers and the interactions between police and citizens based on systematic social observations in small to semi-sized local police forces during the pandemic. The article discusses the nature of police work during the crisis and new types of interventions that police officers are confronted with (e.g. curfew controls). Additionally, the impact of the pandemic on the internal and external relations is discussed. Internally, the COVID-19 measures may have an impact on police officers’ possibilities for personal, social interactions among colleagues, which may potentially challenge the solidarity within the police force. Externally, tensions may arise in relations with citizens, partly because of unclear regulations or variable interpretations of those regulations. Those unclear regulations, but also uncertainties concerning one’s own competences and questions regarding the police’s role in enforcing the pandemic regulations, put pressure on the police’s (self-)legitimacy.

Drones en drone-gerelateerde cybertechnologieën nemen een vlucht in het veiligheidsdomein in de vorm van toepassingen door het leger, de politie, brandweer, private beveiligingsbedrijven, en ook deurwaarders, agrariërs en burgerinitiatieven. Drones werden in eerste instantie ontwikkeld voor militaire doeleinden. Hun aanpassingsvermogen als universele platforms voor beeldregistratie en goederenvervoer leidt tot hoge verwachtingen rond toepassing in het civiele domein. Dit artikel onderzoekt de ethische aspecten van “dual use” van drones en gerelateerde technologieën. Verschillende dimensies van dual use worden verkend: de technologisch ontwikkeling, maar ook de ontwikkeling van wet- en regelgeving in Amerika en Europa. Voor het Nederlandse veiligheidsdomein is relevant dat dit artikel bijdraagt aan het signaleren van de noodzaak om de ontwikkeling en toepassing van drones in breder perspectief te bezien. Drones en hun toepassingen maken deel uit van de internationale markt van militaire organisaties en van veiligheidsorganisaties in het publieke en private domein. Bovendien maken ze veelal deel uit van geïntegreerde systemen en van wereldwijde platforms voor consumentenelektronica. Dit artikel is een van de resultaten uit het door NWO gefinancierde project 'Responsible Design of Drones and Drone Services: Towards an Ethical and Juridical Tool For Drone Design and Risk Assessment' (Project no. 313-99-318). Het project was gericht op het ontwikkelen van een instrument voor ontwikkeling en gebruik van dronetoepassingen uitgaande van methoden als Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI) en Value Sensitive Design (VSD).

Indigenous claims have challenged a number of orthodoxies within state legal systems, one of them being the kinds of proof that can be admissible. In Canada, the focus has been on the admissibility and weight of oral traditions and histories. However, these novel forms are usually taken as alternative means of proving a set of facts that are not in themselves “cultural”, for example, the occupation by a group of people of an area of land that constitutes Aboriginal title. On this view, maps are a neutral technology for representing culturally different interests within those areas. Through Indigenous land use studies, claimants have been able to deploy the powerful symbolic capital of cartography to challenge dominant assumptions about “empty” land and the kinds of uses to which it can be put. There is a risk, though, that Indigenous understandings of land are captured or misrepresented by this technology, and that what appears neutral is in fact deeply implicated in the colonial project and occidental ideas of property. This paper will explore the possibilities for an alternative cartography suggested by digital technologies, by Indigenous artists, and by maps beyond the visual order.

The Dutch National Police deploys video technology, for instance body-worn video camera (bodycams), drones, helicopters with cameras, and mobile units for surveillance. Four types of video technology are discussed: CCTV, bodycams, smart cameras and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR). These four types will be the most prominent applications of visual technology in the coming years, according to ‘Vision on sensing’, published in 2015 by the National Police. The potential benefits of video images for prosecution and in the courtroom are discussed in a separate paragraph, followed by a survey of recent changes in the laws regulating this technology.

To improve security in crowded environments, such as airports, shopping malls and railway stations, the number of surveillance cameras (CCTV) is rapidly increasing. However, the number of human operators remains limited and only a selection of the video streams can be observed. This makes it hard for an operator to be proactive. This paper gives an overview of novel developments that may lead to more efficient camera surveillance and a more proactive role for camera operators. It focuses on three main steps in this process of video content analysis: pedestrian tracking, action recognition and behavior analysis. Tracking and re-identification (i.e. recognizing a person in another camera) was initially only evaluated on off-line benchmark datasets, though recently it has gained in maturity with live demonstrations in realistic crowded environments and measured improved operator efficiency. For action recognition and automatic behavior recognition, we observe that the simple patterns, such as loitering detection, are emerging in many applications. Human action recognition obtains very high performance values in controlled environments and it is progressing towards more realistic environments. More advanced approaches, such as pickpocket recognition in a shopping mall and the detection of threats to trucks on a parking lot have been developed and the first systems have been presented in live demonstrations. Our main contribution is that we structure the recent advances and the emerging applications of video analysis for security applications, explain and interpret the results, and identify opportunities for the near future.