It acted as an extremely effective public service announcement and caught the police completely off guard,” Ellis said.ĭr Ellis conducted in-depth interviews with NSW police and former police employees and Sydney LGBT community respondents most closely affected by the video, and analysed media coverage of the cases. It happened at a time when sharing on social media platforms had reached a critical mass which facilitated the video’s viral reach. It had close to 2 million views two weeks after the incident and crossed over into mainstream media reportage. “This was one of the first viral videos of police excessive force in Australia directly uploaded to YouTube.
His PhD involved an in-depth case study of the police excessive force used against Sydney teenager Jamie Jackson at the 2013 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade captured on video (trigger warning – violent content). Institutions such as the police are not always in step with these changes, and effective regulation often lags behind developments in technology.”ĭr Ellis is particularly interested in how the widespread availability of digital video and its direct upload to social media has allowed more public exposure of police excessive force. “Audience expectations have changed and are driven by what technology has made possible. He said social media has a central and ongoing role to play in providing public institutions with candid assessments of their performance, and as a community organising tool. Justin looks at how social media, and amateur video in particular, exposes the ways that people might be criminalised and the role it plays in mitigating or aggravating that process. Dr Justin Ellis is a criminologist researching the impact of this increased exposure on everyday crime and police-public relations.
The rapid evolution of digital technology has enabled the public to place the police under more scrutiny than ever before through the simple act of recording police operations via mobile phones. Dr Justin Ellis is a criminologist studying the impact of digital media technology on crime and criminalisation and how it affects police accountability in cases of police excessive force.