Edinburgh Napier University

  In this chapter, we discuss a selection of ways public police attempt to react to, co-opt, innovate or simply survive the emergence or popularisation of technologies and their criminal or harmful manifestations. We take two thematic case study examples. First, we discuss the adoption of targeted advertising platforms. We consider how police use has evolved alongside more insidious criminal and malicious actors in the form of disinformation. We then proceed to encrypted and/or decentralised communications platforms and illicit markets places and explore the impacts these have had on offending and the various ways policing has adapted. In some cases, the police are forced to reckon with radically novel technologies (e.g. recent advances in generative AI) which when released to the public create new opportunities for harm and criminal activity. The now more antiquated examples are found in the proliferation and development of consumer Internet technologies, where networked computing gave rise to ‘cybercrime’. More recently, we have seen state intervention to challenge the availability of these technologies to UK consumers in the name of crime and security, which we reflect on in our discussion.