Between freedom and domination: popular control over police use of technology

ABSTRACTThis article gives an overview of police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). In doing so it explores the widespread adoption of BWC technology around the world and shows how different jurisdictions are adopting the cameras for a variety of uses. Next, the review examines the empirical research of BWCs and assesses the perceived benefits and concerns of the technology. The article then examines a case study of police use of BWCs in Canada. Politicians and civil rights groups have called on police in Canada to adopt BWCs to improve accountability, but little movement has been made in this direction. The article identifies several reasons why police have been slow to adopt the technology in Canada despite public demand and the widespread deployment of the technology elsewhere. It concludes with suggestions for areas of future research.

<p><b>This dissertation examines the rapid growth in the use of digital data by New Zealand Police. This has occurred with little external oversight to examine the infringement of human rights, including freedom of association, expression, movement and protection from experimentation. These rights can be easily infringed in the absence of human rights impact assessments. These assessments are not currently mandatory. Therefore, Police data management is unwittingly breaching both domestic human rights laws and its international commitments to monitor and supervise police use of these technologies.</b></p> <p>The databases created by Police are already very large and are growing exponentially without regulation. So too is the unregulated adoption of new technologies to gather data. The data is analysed by powerful algorithms to reveal private information about individuals and groups. In turn this is used to predict offending and the profile of the offenders. This has developed in New Zealand without any express legislation to authorise these programs. They have been implemented through internal police administration with little public consultation. There are a number of government agencies with supervisory or persuasive influence on Police but they have not constrained the use of these new data technologies.</p> <p>Building on recent commentaries and reports, this dissertation calls for reform of the supervision of Police. It suggests that scale of police data collection and analysis justifies regulation focused on the Police rather than the technology. It recommends establishing an Inspector-General of Police Data Management to supervise compliance with a binding police code of data management. It will outline how this body will function and how it could be put in law. This would satisfy New Zealand’s commitment to the 2013 United Nations Resolution 68/167 which requires independent and external supervision of surveillance. New Zealand currently has an Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security which serves a similar role for New Zealand intelligence agencies.</p>

Political parties play a major role in democratic processes around the world. Recent empirical research suggests that parties are increasingly less important to citizens. Simultaneously, classic and contemporary theories of representative democracy specifically still minimally incorporate accounts of party benefit. This article attempts to reconcile normative political theory on democratic representation with party politics literature. It evaluates party democracy’s value in comparison with its next best theoretical alternative – pluralist democracy with individual representatives – along two different paths. It argues that parties are not flawless, but party democracy is preferable over pluralist democracy. Parties increase predictability and the transparency of policy outcomes. This, in turn, facilitates better accountability between voters and their representatives. In addition, parties save politics from becoming a dispersed and even possibly a contradictory set of actions.

In the previous chapter we looked at the liberal dimension of democracy, focused upon limited, law-based government and on the rights and freedoms of citizens. Now we turn to the second main element in the concept of liberal democracy: popular control, the extent to which citizens can impose their will upon government. Under the despotism — sometimes enlightened, more often not — of the Tsars and their communist successors political control operated in the reverse direction: the government controlled the people.1 Indeed both Tsarist and Communist governments saw it as their duty not just to provide the conditions for citizens to live their own lives free from foreign invaders or domestic criminals, but to mould and 'improve' the religion, ethics and morals of citizens themselves. To a degree, of course, all governments do that, but the long sequence of Soviet 'campaigns' to reform their citizens — of which the last was Gorbachev's campaign against alcohol2 — expressed a uniquely paternalistic contempt for public opinion.

REPONSE TO RICHARD BERNSTEIN Michael Simmons, Jr. SUNY at Buffalo If I were to compress Dewey into a single sentence it would be as follows: "Live like an art object striving to become a work of art." In unpacking his essence I would have to locate, identify, and explain the existence, the functions, the interrelations, and the meanings of events and objects; the instrumental and the consummatory; evolution, experience, and communication; community and democracy; the historical necessities, no longer valid, of various dualisms; the relation of theory to practice; the centrality of education to our human being. Richard Bernstein's John Dewey Society Lecture, "The Varieties of Pluralism" under the same severe compression would emerge as "Keep the Faith. Phronesis realized is democratic pluralism. Act so as to connect." Unpacking Dewey is easier than unpacking Bernstein. All of Dewey is present, before us, as it were. But the Bernstein lecture is the Bernstein lecture—a piece of writing given strength and also partially undone by the conditions of its final cause. It is writing of a certain length, constructed to be presented as a public event, intended to inform, to instruct, to caution and advise, and to give strength to any flagging spirits among us. And this it did, and does, demonstrating enviable knowledge and masterful control of the history of pragmatism and the rise and fall of the hegemony of analytic philosophy, presenting valuable insights respecting the development of "wild pluralism," and offering a timely reminder of how metaphysics informs social thought...and much more. But I find myself torn by "Varieties of Pluralism," both a t t r a c t e d and disturbed by it. I want something more, something more speculatively audacious (see again Dewey's call for speculative audacity with which Bernstein concludes his lecture, p. 18) than phronesis, yet I am not sure there is something more. Within the limits imposed by the lecture there is not. I also find the lecture facing a large, ironic problem, one of -22- -23Bernstein 's own making. Although it is public event, the lecture is not July Fourth oratory; it is learned discourse. It exists within a context consisting in part of John Dewey, Praxis and Action, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, and Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I find it impossible to read "Varieties" without playing it off against these other Bernstein works in which he has subjected Dewey and more recently the Big four—Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, and Rorty—to serious criticism while still finding in them insights into "the problems of men" without which we would be at great loss. My reading, then, creates and exacerbates already existing tensions in "Varieties" and accounts in part for my difficulties with it. Bernstein in less inspirational tone, in more critical voice, hovers over his John Dewey Lecture. The kind of questions Bernstein has put to others, to obtain concrete social and political knowledge, must ultimately be put to Bernstein. Otherwise we shall remain at a dangerous level of abstraction—confronted and appealed to by a vision of democratic pluralism (one impossible to deny) that is to function in a society we recognize through the familiarity of a commonsense understanding, which by its nature lacks depth and critical insight. Bernstein's Deweyan roots and his own published work tell us that vision joined to commonsense understanding is not enough. Like all writing, Bernstein's lecture speaks to us and the world by creating a universe of meaning and discourse which beckons us to enter. What is the world of Bernstein's "The Varieties of Pluralism"? It is several worlds. It is a world of messaged hope grounded in the history of philosophy and the nature of praxis. It is a world in which there is a second chance which will not become farce because the first chance has yet to become exhausted—or realized. We still possess the gift that is Dewey and the best of the pragmatic understanding of phronesis and democratic pluralism. We are in position to reinvent and use them, now aided by the work of current advocates and reinventors of phronesis, be their terrain ontological investigation or socio-historical critique. In...

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Theorems and Models in Political Theory: An Application to Pettit on Popular Control

Liberalism and the rhetoric of rights have come under fire in recent decades as a range of feminist, queer, communitarian, and critical political theorists have questioned the kinds and quality of justice that an exclusive concern with rights can offer pluralistic democratic societies. Underlying this critique has been the wide-ranging question of incommensurability--in particular, the question of how public discourse in pluralistic democracies can take up, if not entirely resolve, disputes over value-laden moral conflicts. On the one hand, liberalist political philosophers such as Rawls (1971) make a strong case for prioritizing individual rights over conceptions of the moral good. Rawls argues that in a pluralistic democracy with a range of competing moral orders, justice must be arrived at independently of conceptions of the good. As Sandel (1996) describes this perspective, government should be neutral with respect to goods and and shouldn't endorse any particular version of the good life. In his n otion of justice as fairness, Rawls (1971) describes two a priori principles of justice: that each person has equal rights to the most basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others, and that social and economic inequalities are arranged so that they are to everyone's advantage and open to all. Once these principles are in place, Rawlsian citizens are free to deliberate for their individual rational self-interests. On the other hand, communitarian theorists such as Michael Sandel (1996) describe liberalism as too thin. For one thing, Sandel wants space for civic republicanism--public deliberation over community interests and moral values. For another, he questions the possibility of affirming certain freedoms and rights as fundamental without embracing some vision of the good life. Critical political theorist Chantel Mouffe (1990) offers a way out of this impasse by arguing that what's wrong with Rawls' theory of justice is not his vision of the right over the good, but his rationalization of it. Equality and liberty, she claims, are political, not moral values. While Rawls is right to argue that a political conception of justice cannot be derived from one particular conception of the good life, he wrongly conflates moral and political and fails to think of individual subjectivity as discursively constructed through practices and institutions. Because of this, Rawls reduces politics to a rational process of negotiation among private citizens under the constraints of morality... To think politics in terms of moral language, as Rawls does, necessarily leads to neglect of the role played by conflict, power, and interest (p. 225). Thus, Mouffe argues, Rawlsian public deliberation is superfluous, leaving no room for collective action and deliberation over the political common good. Like the communitarians, Mouffe argues that, modem political philosophy should articulate political values (p. 232). But unlike them she argues against conceptualizing political subjects and practices in moral terms. Further, like Rawls, she believes that political action and deliberation should be firmly grounded in the democratic priorities of liberty and equality. But unlike traditional liberalists, she sees in political liberalism the potential to defend democracy by deepening and extending the range of democratic practices through the creation of subject within a democratic matrix (p. 233). QUEERING THE DEMOCRATIC MATRIX The case of public argument about sexual minorities brings these underlying tensions of democratic pluralism to the forefront: how do we address the moral implicit in democratic deliberations about gay and lesbian civil rights? How does a just society respond to the rights claims made by new subject positions of despised sexual minorities? Three recent books trace the contours of this dilemma by examining the rhetorical practices and constraints surrounding contemporary public discourse about variant sexualities. …

Our knowledge of networked governance is first acquired through empirical research. Like other empirically derived concepts - Robert Dahl’s ‘democratic pluralism’ or Robert Putman’s ‘social capital’ - its cogence comes from being built on observable facts. Networks occur in government and in governance, they can be described and how they work can be ‘mapped’. What is missing from our lexicon to discuss and, more importantly, evaluate networks is the normative dimension. How ought networks to work? Can we develop an argument that says networked government, or networked service delivery, is in any sense ‘better’ than other organisational forms? To answer these questions and to answer the questions posed more broadly here about the politics of new forms of public governance and leadership, we need to look to more traditional political theory: to evaluate the use of networks in terms of democracy rather than just in terms of empirical description. By bringing our empirical knowledge of the existence of networks into conjunction with the normative values of democracy it is hoped to provide some insights on how public sector managers in regimes who aspire to deliver democratic outcomes might ‘lead’ through the use of ‘networks’. Of course, such a discussion presents something of a methodological nightmare as, rather than supplanting the meta narrative of representative government with a post modern narrative of ‘governance’ and ‘networks’, it brings them together. Any incommensurability, however, can only serve to exemplify and highlight the complexity of ‘leadership’ in the contemporary public sector.

One of most troubling aspects of politics of homelessness, Leonard C. Feldman contends, is reduction of homeless to what Hannah Arendt calls the abstract nakedness of humanity and what Giorgio Agamben terms bare life. Feldman argues that politics of alleged compassion and politics of those interested in ridding public spaces of homeless are linked fundamentally in their assumption that homeless people are something less than citizens. Feldman's book brings political theories together (including theories of sovereign power, justice, and pluralism) with discussions of real-world struggles and close analyses of legal cases concerning rights of homeless.In Feldman's view, bare life predicament is a product not simply of poverty or inequality but of an inability to commit to democratic pluralism. Challenging this reduction of homeless, Citizens without Shelter examines opportunities for contesting such a fundamental political exclusion, in service of homeless citizenship and a more robust form of democratic pluralism. Feldman has in mind a truly democratic pluralism that would include a pluralization of category of home to enable multiple forms of dwelling; a recognition of common dwelling activities of homeless and non-homeless persons; and a resistance to laws that punish or confine homeless.

The “just war” philosophy of Cicero, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas has had momentous and provocative implications for modern political theory. The use of force by police is one theme through which the just war tradition can be utilized to demonstrate the extent of infusion for the concept in the Western political archetype. As police become constrained in their use of force, they are bound by the concepts inherent in the philosophy of the just war doctrine. The Supreme Court, likewise, has been influenced by the philosophy of the just war tradition in many of its decisions regarding the proper use of force by police.

Political theory is notoriously a hodgepodge. Whatever its status may be, no one would claim that it today occupies a standing comparable to that of economic theory. Theorists variously attempt to justify or to explain, to provide bases for prediction or frame works for analysis. Even within the realm of democratic theory there is no august corpus, in Holmes's phrase, no body of closely articulated propositions with which in general all agree, subject only to differences of emphasis or in detail. One hears of classical democratic theory; but if it must include both Locke and Rousseau, Bentham and the two Mills, not to mention T. H. Green and other democratic Idealists, it is clear that it is a bundle of theories rather than a single body of doctrine. Likewise we hear today of revision ist democratic theory, the theory of polyarchy or pluralist democ racy, and most recently theories of participatory democracy, which even out-Rousseau the great Genevan.1 The subject to be discussed in these pages is theories of liberal democracy. What I take to be fundamental to the concept of liberal democracy is that those who are legally empowered to determine basic policies should be selected, directly or indirectly, for limited terms, and ultimately accountable to the electorate (which must include all sane adults, with certain generally acknowledged excep tions) , in some fashion that entitles each of its members to an equal

Computer graphics has become a very active field of information science. With the adoption of many advanced technologies, computer graphics, especially 3-D animation and virtual reality, has bright prospects. In this section, we introduce some basic aspects, especially about the visual plant, which is a hotspot in agriculture informatics. First we introduce some concepts in 3-D animation and popular modeling technologies, rendering, and motion control, then a brief description of virtual reality. Finally we introduce some applications of 3-D animation and virtual reality in agriculture, especially achievements in virtual plants, including modeling methods and modeling tools for virtual plants.

The distinct flavor of each local prosecutor’s office persists in North Carolina despite unusually strong efforts to centralize and unify the prosecution function across the entire state. The 44 offices share a common legal framework, including structured sentencing rules that channel the available punishments in predictable directions. Almost all their operating funds derive from the state rather than from the local level of government. The ties that bind the offices together do not, however, create a single organizational identity. Each office pursues a unique mix of criminal charges, responsive to the priorities of local voters. Local offices also differ from one another in the sentencing results they obtain. Thus, the North Carolina experience demonstrates the relatively weak influence of substantive criminal law, sentencing law, and other formal legal structures in the face of demographic differences, local political constraints, office size, and organizational culture. In a democratic society, residents expect prosecutors to make choices consistent with their own values and priorities. Yet in North Carolina, voters also recognize that the state is not culturally homogeneous: Charlotte is not like Shallotte. Localism is a natural consequence of tight popular control over criminal justice in a pluralistic democracy.

Taking her present essay as my point of departure, I elaborate key aspects of Chantal Mouffe's theorization of radical and plural democracy. In particular, I stress the importance of rearticulating hegemony, reason, and time and space for a theory of politics and the political commensurate with radical democracy.