Strategic workshop: Gathering against harmful Digital policing, planning for safety

On 7 and 8 May 2024, Weaving Liberation and the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) joined forces to organise a strategic workshop on digital policing. More than 20 community organisers, lawyers, racial, social justice and digital rights organisations gathered in Hastiere (Belgium) with the aim of addressing the disproportionate impact of technology by law enforcement on racialised and marginalised communities. During two days, we wanted to provide a space to share knowledge, organise jointly and find support whilst resisting the deployment of digital tools by different law enforcement agencies across Europe.

Planned as a retreat in the countryside, enabling for people to disconnect from the everyday grind and regenerate in a wholesome environment, we designed an agenda that could encapsulate the expertise of the attendees and provide room to foster collective resistance and solidarity. We aimed to understand better how to work together and leverage the power of strategic litigation, coalition-building and community-organising as a tool to support affected communities.

We succesfully gathered a unique composition of organisations that supported the exchange of ideas, strategies and recommendations on how to move towards a better awareness of the digital policing landscape across Europe and how it concretely affects marginalised communities with a special focus on racialised people.  We heard from organisations such as Ghettup and La Quadrature du Net from France, StraLi in Italy, Kids of Colour and Liberty from the U.K., Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte from Germany, Center for Danish Muslim Relations (CEDA) from Denmark, Iridia from Spain, Romnja Feminist Library, Equinox. Justice, Equity and Technology table and EDRi Europewide… We learned from different collectives and movements as well as strategised about how this knowledge can inform our next steps and actions.

Many underlined what matters when strategising across movements : 

  • Placing the impacts of technological harms within a larger understanding of harmful policing practices : the harms of digital policing are part of a larger issue and need to be addressed as such 
  • Digital policing cannot be challenged using only one instrument : to build strong litigation cases that change the situation for the impacted communities, you need to do community-work which can mean organising cultural events to bring about joy, educational programme, legal counselling, intervention training etc. 
  • Having a strong common vision of what safety can look beyond digital policing is key to propose amendments, litigation strategies and/or advocacy  that are future-proof and coherent from files to files, cases to cases. 
  • Building capacity to mobilise non-discrimination law frameworks when challenging digital policing is crucially needed

The gathering allowed the group to share their current work, learnings about what has worked in their case and how they did it, start talking about next steps- for example regarding the upcoming  implementation of the AI act, centering priorities of marginalised communities, always prioritising language accessibility to build a robust idea of the different perspectives in terms of expertise, lived experiences, and values.

The participants highlighted how important and rare such spaces are, many meeting for the first time and fully investing in connecting with one another during the two days. They also underlined the importance to continue mapping and questioning continuously who should be part of these discussions and who can add an extra value in terms of geography, communities and knowledge.  Many additional topics were impossible to cover in two days, but the gathering opened the door to set up further channels of communication and knowledge exchange which were planned during the next-step sessions.

We are committed to continuing this crucial work of offering strategising spaces to enable new connections, common visions and shared plans to emerge to challenge harmful use of technologies in law enforcement contexts.  We are looking forward to see the fruits of the promising next steps formulated during the workshop!

Written in collaboration with Laurence Meyer, Co-director at Weaving Liberation

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