Edinburgh Napier University

  Three decades of technological transformation has created exciting opportunities and insidious challenges for public policing. While globalised bulk cybercrime frustrates conventional national criminal justice apparati, traditional serious and organised crime has assimilated hardware, digital infrastructure and online business models to become more resilient police disruption and intervention. In this seminar, I will discuss an emergent strategy we term ‘influence policing’ (Horgan et al., 2024; Collier et al., 2023, 2024): police harnessing the affordances of private advertising platforms to deliver sophisticated strategic communication campaigns in pursuit of strategic and operational policing outcomes. Several ‘modes of influence’ identified by analysing the Meta-ad library’s records of UK government and police targeted advertisements will be critically examined. In our paper, we argue that influence policing raises fundamental questions about privacy, police accountability, democratic policing principles, and new configurations of police power. I will argue that ‘influence policing’ should be understood as one of a growing number of examples of UK and European policing adaptations and innovations emerging in response to crime problems generated or enhanced by rapid technological development. We suggest this pattern of policing innovation and adaptation necessitates closer and sustained criminological scrutiny.