As part of our History of Interactive Media module with Jerry Durlak, Sharon Rotman and I created a prototype for a social networking site called Police Report as an exercise in citizen democracy and a response to notions of surveillance.

A recent CP article describing a Youtube video showed how police agent provocateurs allegedy were inciting crowd at the Montebello, Québec, summit. This sparked our imagination on how social media can be used to catalogue incidents of harassment or misconduct by police officers.

In our system, individual “police reports” build case histories. The database of reports is an archive of rare manifestations of police misconduct, but more often a catalogue of benign events that may help in clarifying facts. The site does not aim to discredit individual police officers or the role of police in modern society. The project is geared towards citizens concerned with the protection of their civil liberties and possessing a desire to promote and maintain the accountability of law enforcement.

There are obvious legal ramifications left unexplored, and no guarantee that the submissions aren’t authentic, but the idea, we thought, was novel and, we hope, socially relevant.

If you’re interested, you can download the Powerpoint: Police Report (1.9MB)