Projet Bertillon has recently launched. Coordinated by IdentiNet participants Ilsen About and Pierre Piazza, and hosted by Criminocorpus, this valuable online resource offers a comprehensive overview of the life and work of Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), a pioneer of forensic identification methods at the Paris Prefecture de Police whose criminological expertise ranged from mug shots, anthropometry, and dactyloscopy through file management and the analysis of crime scenes. The site, which is available in both English and French, contains innovative online galleries of Bertillon-related imagery as well as academic resources such as biographies, bibliographies, and links, and is also inviting the submission of new articles on Bertillon for online publication in 2011. For further information, please visit Projet Bertillon.
Posts Tagged 'Policing'
Projet Bertillon Launches
Published April 14, 2010 Calls for Papers , Member Activities , Projects and Centres , Websites Leave a CommentTags: Bertillon, Biometrics, Crime, Fingerprinting, Forensics, France, Nineteenth Century, Photography, Policing, Profiling
CCTV Takes to the Skies
Published January 25, 2010 News Stories Leave a CommentTags: Britain, CCTV, Civil Liberties, Crime, Military, Policing, Security, Surveillance, technology
'Guardian Spirit of the Waters', by Odilon Redon (1878). Wikimedia Commons.
The Guardian and The Telegraph newspapers ran stories this weekend reporting that UK police are planning to use unmanned ‘spy drones’, originally developed for surveillance in military contexts, to monitor antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves, and fly-tippers. According to the reports, an arms manufacturer is currently developing the so-called Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) – capable of taking high-resolution images from heights of up to 20,000ft – for civilian deployment, and that the drones could be in use by local forces in time for the London Olympics in 2012. For the full reports, see here (Guardian [includes video and comments]) and here (Telegraph).
Seminar: Foucault, Databases, and the Dispositif
Published January 21, 2010 Member Activities , Seminars Leave a CommentTags: DNA Databases, Europe, Foucault, Policing, Profiling, Security, Surveillance, technology, Twentieth Century
The first ‘brown bag lunch’ IPS discussion seminar will take place at King’s College London on Thursday 28 January 2010. Co-organised by IdentiNet participant Didier Bigo, discussion will be introduced by a presentation from Andrea Molteni (University of Milan) on the functioning of the concept of the dispositif within the work of Michel Foucault, which will go on to consider its relevance to the analysis of DNA databases, especially within the Italian context (a full abstract is available here). Wine will be provided, and participants are encouraged to bring along their own sandwiches. The seminar will take place from 12.30pm–2.30pm in the War Studies meeting room, which is on the sixth floor of the King’s Building on Strand Campus (map). If you wish to attend, please confirm with andrea.molteni@kcl.ac.uk. Picture: Flickr/dullhunk (CC)
Workshop: Legal Medicine and Expertise in History
Published November 13, 2009 Conferences Leave a CommentTags: Crime, Fingerprinting, Forensics, Legal Frameworks, Medicine, Policing
A one-day workshop to be held at Oxford Brookes University on Friday 4 December 2009 will explore ‘Legal Medicine and Expertise in History’. According to the organizers, ‘[T]he workshop is designed to facilitate intellectual exchange and debate between academics working on the history of forensic medicine, by bringing together scholars who study the subject in a variety of national contexts and across a broad period of time. It will engage with two central themes: the character and role of forensic medicine in Europe since the medieval period; and the relationship between medicine, the law and wider society as illuminated by the notion of ‘expertise’’. It promises to be rich in identification angles; for further details, including speaker information, full programme and abstracts, see the workshop webpage. Picture: Flickr (CC)
New Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition
Published July 30, 2009 Publications Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Fingerprinting, Forensics, Policing
Posted by Massimiliano Pagani. A new version of the Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition was published in May 2009. The authors announce that this is not a mere new edition. The 2009 book is a major update that describes the most recent advances in fingerprinting, represented by over 500 papers on fingerprint recognition published between 2003 and 2008. The DVD included with the book also contains the databases used in the 2004 Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC 2004). For full details and ordering information see the Springer website. Picture: stock.xchng
Special Issue: Traceability and Networks
Published May 7, 2009 Member Activities , Publications Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Civil Liberties, France, Policing, Privacy, Registration, Social Networks, technology, Twentieth Century
The French social science journal Hermès has dedicated its April issue (number 53) to the timely theme of ‘Traceability and Networks’. Articles explore the tracking of personal information across a wide range of social and technological contexts, and pay particular attention to the privacy implications of electronic data collection, ‘Web 2.0′ applications and online social networks. IdentiNet member Pierre Piazza has also contributed an article on the expansion of police records in recent decades, and the increased potential for administrative dysfuction and misuse of personal data that this has entailed. An overview of the issue’s contents can be found here (pdf), while detailed abstracts (with English translations) can be found here (pdf). Picture: xtof/flickr (CC)
Paper: Police and Identification in France
Published April 11, 2009 Papers Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Crime, Eighteenth Century, Europe, Forensics, France, Policing, Registration
Vincent Denis, a Professor of Modern History at the Université de Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne , is due to deliver a paper at the University of Oxford entitled ‘Police and Identification in France, From the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Empire’. Denis has published widely on the history of individual identification in eighteenth-century and Napoleonic France, and most recently is the author of Une histoire de l’identité: France, 1715-1815 (Champvallon: Seyssel, 2008). His paper will take place on Monday 27 April 2009 at 5.15pm in the Mordan Hall of St Hugh’s College; for more information see here.
CFP: Forensic Image and Video Processing
Published April 1, 2009 Calls for Papers , Conferences Leave a CommentTags: CCTV, Crime, Forensics, Photography, Policing, Security, technology
Posted by Massimiliano Pagani. Paper submission is now open for the ‘Special Session on Forensic Image and Video Processing’ at the 6th International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis (ISPA 2009) that will take place in in Salzburg, Austria on 16-18 September 2009. The objective of this Special Session is to bring together researchers and police forces in order to answer new forensic challenges with state of the art image and video processing research. For more info see the conference website; the call for papers is also available as a pdf. The deadline for the submission of full papers is 15 April 2009.
Police Files in France: The STIC
Published March 10, 2009 Member Activities , Publications Leave a CommentTags: Civil Liberties, France, Policing, Registration
IdentiNet member Pierre Piazza has contributed to an article entitled ‘Le Stic, un fichier mal fichu’, recently published in the French daily newspaper Libération. It assesses the reliability and privacy implications of the Système de Traitement des Infractions Constatées (STIC), a police database containing the details of 8.7% of the French population (or 5.5 million people). Picture: stock.xchng
Cultures et Conflits: Issue Proposal
Published February 10, 2009 Calls for Papers , Member Activities , Publications Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Civil Liberties, Globalisation, Migration, Policing, Profiling, Registration, Surveillance
Posted by Didier Bigo
Numéro de Cultures et Conflits consacré à la thématique
« Conséquences humaines de l’échange transnational des données individuelles »
Didier Bigo et Pierre Piazza (dir.)
Depuis quelques années, on assiste à l’échelon transnational à une accélération et amplification du processus de partage et d’échange d’informations sur les personnes. Surtout légitimé comme un indispensable impératif de sécurité en vue de faire face efficacement à des risques et menaces susceptibles de saper les fondements de la démocratie (terrorisme, criminalité organisée, immigration illégale, fraudes, etc.), l’essor de ce processus prend forme à travers la mise en place d’une multitude de canaux et de dispositifs (via par exemple, dans le cadre de l’UE, la mise en avant des principes de disponibilité de l’information et d’interopérabilité des systèmes servant à la récolter) qui, rendant possible une massification de la circulation de ces informations, implique désormais un nombre croissant d’acteurs étatiques (services de renseignement, d’immigration, de contrôle des frontières, magistrats, etc.) et supranationaux (Interpol, Europol, Eurojust, etc.). Ces informations à caractère personnel dont le traitement autorise notamment l’accomplissement de pratiques policières sous-tendues par une logique proactive d’anticipation des comportements (data mining, profilage, etc.) concernent des individus stigmatisés comme dangereux enregistrés sur des « listes de suspects » mais aussi des catégories de personnes de plus en plus larges (systématisation du recours aux passengers name records, aux identifiants biométriques, etc.) sur lesquelles s’exercent à présent de nouveaux modes de contrôle et de surveillance.
