Citizen-led digital policing and democratic norms: The case of self-styled paedophile hunters
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895819880956 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Katerina Hadjimatheou |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819880956
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 21(4) 547 –565
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895819880956
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Citizen-led digital policing and
democratic norms: The case of
self-styled paedophile hunters
Katerina Hadjimatheou
University of Essex, UK
Abstract
Citizen involvement in the provision of security is often presented as a win–win way to relieve
pressure on police resources while building stronger, more responsible and democratically
engaged communities. Governments in countries such as the United Kingdom and the
Netherlands have adopted a ‘strategy of responsibilisation’ designed to encourage, enable and
support citizens to take on tasks otherwise left for police. Yet, this strategy conspicuously ignores
the growing number of citizen-led digital policing initiatives which operate independently without
the encouragement or guidance of police. This article considers the implications of this trend for
democratic norms in policing. It uses the phenomenon of self-styled paedophile hunters – which
are now active in countries around the world – as a case study. The article makes comparisons
between such initiatives and other, relatively well-theorised informal security providers, such as
vigilante groups and civilian policing. It argues that, like vigilantes, citizen-led digital police often
challenge democratic principles of transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Yet, like other
civilian policing initiatives, they increase empowerment and participation, and rely for their success
on the presence of strong and legitimate institutions of justice, to which they ultimately defer.
These characteristics present a discreet set of opportunities and challenges for contemporary
policing, which this article argues can only be addressed by strategic police engagement.
Keywords
Civilian policing, digilantism, paedophile hunting, social media, vigilantism
Introduction
In 1829, the Home Secretary to the UK government Sir Robert Peel published nine prin-
ciples that were to establish the purpose and guide the conduct of the first official police
Corresponding author:
Katerina Hadjimatheou, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe House, Colchester CO4
3SQ, UK.
Email: k.hadjimatheou@essex.ac.uk
880956CRJ0010.1177/1748895819880956Criminology & Criminal JusticeHadjimatheou
research-article2019
Article
548 Criminology & Criminal Justice 21(4)
force. The so-called ‘Peelian Principles’ have both defined law enforcement in the United
Kingdom ever since, and influenced the professionalisation of policing internationally.
The most famous of these principles states that
The police are the public and the public are the police. The police being only members of the
public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen
in the interest of community welfare and existence.
Peel’s intention in articulating this principle was to assuage public fears that the estab-
lishment of a police service would lead to a police state, as had occurred in France. His
principles reassured citizens that the new police service would promote the interests of
the community rather than those of the government of the day. Peel presented a vision of
policing as a fundamentally democratic enterprise, in which policing of the people is
done by the people for the people.
Today, almost 200 years later, the idea that ‘the police are the public and the public the
police’ is enjoying something of a resurgence, as citizens take a range of proactive meas-
ures to protect their communities from crime. Some of these measures, known as ‘co-
production’, involve police-initiated partnerships with communities (Chang et al., 2016;
Terpstra, 2008). But others spring up spontaneously and operate independently without
police authorisation. These proactive, citizen-led initiatives – hereafter referred to as
‘citizen-led digital policing’ – often do much of their work online, as the digital world
provides them with the technological opportunities to set and pursue their own security
agendas (Owen et al., 2017; Trottier, 2017). They perform a range of policing functions,
from undertaking undercover investigations, to solving cases with self-taught digital
forensics (Halber, 2015), to crowdsourcing intelligence through the use of social media
(Crump, 2011; Schneider and Trottier, 2011; Trottier, 2014). In many countries, an
increasing number of these citizen-led, digitally mediated security initiatives now oper-
ate alongside state police and the private sector.
In his 2008 paper on civilian policing and vigilantism, Sharp et al. (2008) observed
that ‘there is a lack of regulation and evaluation of such measures and also very little
research generally on the development of civilian policing’ (p. 246). Despite the widely
acknowledged proliferation of digital-based ‘DIY policing’ initiatives that have sprung
up in the decade since then,1 civilian policing has, as Nhan et al. (2017: 344) note, ‘yet
to generate significant interest on the part of researchers or the police’. This article
attempts to address this gap by examining the potential implications of citizen-led digital
policing initiatives for the democratic legitimacy of policing. It does so via a focused
analysis of one, fast-growing, yet deeply controversial trend in the field of citizen-led
digital policing, namely ‘paedophile hunting’.
Paedophile hunting (here as proactive citizen use of the anonymity of online spaces
such as social media to assume false identities as children and ‘trap’ would-be child sex
offenders) as a case-study through which to examine the normative implications of cit-
izen-led digital policing makes sense for a number of reasons. First, the fact that paedo-
phile hunting is both entirely independent of state policing and entirely dependent for
its success on the existence of novel policing opportunities offered by digital platforms
– in this case, social media – makes it paradigmatic of citizen-led digital policing
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