Analyzing protest mobilization on Telegram: The case of 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill movement in Hong Kong

Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese—one of the low-resource Asian languages,—as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders—those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement,—such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.

Biking Where Black: Connecting Transportation Planning and Infrastructure to Disproportionate Policing

This study asks whether deficiencies in transportation are associated with disproportionate policing in Chicago using the case of cycling. I examine how the number of bicycle citations issued per street segment are influenced by the availability of bicycle facilities and street characteristics, controlling for crash incidence, police presence, and neighborhood characteristics. Tickets were issued 8 times more often per capita in majority Black tracts and 3 times more often in majority Latino tracts compared to majority white tracts. More tickets were issued on major streets, but up to 85% fewer were issued when those streets had bike facilities, which were less prevalent in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Tickets were not associated with bicycle injury-crashes and inversely associated with vehicle injury-crashes. Infrastructure inequities compound the effects of racially-biased policing in the context of transportation safety strategies. Remedies include the removal of traffic enforcement from safe systems strategies and equitable investment in cycling.

Residents’ perceptions of policing and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic has raised unique challenges for police. Reductions in manpower due to officer illness and the need to social distance to suppress spread of the disease restricts the ability of police to fully engage with the public and deliver full services. Changes to policing strategies may affect residents’ feelings of safety and their relationships with police. The purpose of this study is to understand high crime area residents’ experiences with police and safety during the pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe current study draws on household surveys of residents across three high crime, disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis County, Missouri. We implemented three methods. First, we synthesized qualitative feedback about the impact on safety and policing. Second, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests compared pre-pandemic assessments of policing and safety measures to measures collected during the pandemic. Finally, we employed multinomial regression to examine how perceived changes in policing affected residents’ change in safety during the pandemic.FindingsResidents saw police less and engaged with police less during the pandemic. They reported hearing gunshots more often. Reduced police presence in neighborhoods led to mixed effects on safety, largely decreasing residents’ feelings of safety. However, two factors that consistently improved safety were positive encounters with police and police being less involved with minor offenses.Originality/valueThis is the first study that assesses the pandemic impact on residents’ perceptions of safety and police in disadvantaged, high crime contexts.

Police visibility, trust in police fairness, and collective efficacy: A multilevel Structural Equation Model

Areas high in collective efficacy – where residents know and trust one another and are willing to intervene to solve neighbourhood problems – tend to experience less crime. Policing is thought to be one antecedent to collective efficacy, but little empirical research has explored this question. Using three waves of survey data collected from London residents over three consecutive years, and multilevel Structural Equation Modelling, this study tested the impact of police visibility and police–community engagement on collective efficacy. We explored direct effects as well as indirect effects through trust in police. The findings showed levels of police visibility predicted trust in police. Trust in police fairness, in turn, predicted collective efficacy. There was a small indirect relationship between police visibility and collective efficacy, through trust in police fairness. In other words, police presence in neighbourhoods was associated with more positive views about officer behaviour, which in turn was associated with collective efficacy. The findings have important implications for policies designed to build stronger, more resilient communities.

Opioids, Observation, and Restricting Access in the Public Emergency Room

This chapter presents ethnographic evidence of the restriction of medicine in the large, urban public emergency room. There are two routine problems facing triage staff: that there are always too many urgently sick patients whom staff have no real reason to favor for scarce hospital beds, and far too many less-urgently sick patients who technically should never receive beds. The rational rules of triage do not provide the means to reconcile these two problems and, moreover, they mandate that all of these patients be treated. The chapter details how a culture of understanding patients through criminal stigma, the widespread administration of pharmaceutical drugs during the wait, and police presence all work the resolve these two fundamental problems of hospitalization. It is this work that triage staff do—to produce patients that appear less medically needy—that ensures the extreme waiting lines do not become legally problematic.

Police in the Eyes of the Ghetto Population

This chapter begins with a description of the first days of the Jewish police presence on the ghetto streets, wherein the Jewish population welcomed the appearance of the functionaries with a smile of kindness. It cites underground Jewish newspapers that illustrated the policemen as characters from the land of Adam Czerniaków's grotesque. It also notes how some Jews portrayed the police as a criminal organization and as a real threat to the unity of the community. The chapter talks about ghetto inhabitants that saw the policemen as people with agency, who chose to carry out orders against the interest of other Jews. It looks at the majority of personal documents written in the ghetto by those who considered themselves to be victims of the overwhelming violence of the police, which saw the Jewish Order Service as a collection of smugglers, Gestapo informers, and war profiteers.