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23Policing the Gaps: Legitimacy, Special Obligations, and Omissions in Law EnforcementCriminal Law and Philosophy 17 (2): 407-427. 2023.The ethics of policing currently neglects to provide a framework for analysing the morality of deliberate inactions to prevent harm, even though these are often adopted tactically by police as a means of preventing greater harms. In this paper we argue (a) that police have special moral obligations to prevent harm, grounded both in a contractarian account of police legitimacy and in the interpersonal morality of associations and (b) that police are morally culpable for failures to fulfil these s…Read more
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19Neither Confirm nor Deny: Secrecy and Disclosure in Undercover PolicingCriminal Justice Ethics 36 (3): 279-296. 2017.Recent scandals in U.K. undercover policing have prompted a public re-examination of the basis for continued secrecy with respect to cases in which serious historical misconduct is suspected. As pa...
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44Surveillance Technologies, Wrongful Criminalisation, and the Presumption of InnocencePhilosophy and Technology 30 (1): 39-54. 2017.The potential of surveillance practices to undermine the presumption of innocence is a growing concern amongst critics of surveillance. This paper attempts to assess the impact of surveillance on the presumption of innocence. It defends an account of the presumption of innocence as a protection against wrongful criminalisation against alternatives, and considers both the ways in which surveillance might undermine that protection and the—hitherto overlooked—ways in which it might promote it. It d…Read more
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25Criminal Labelling, Publicity, and PunishmentLaw and Philosophy 35 (6): 567-593. 2016.This paper considers whether publicizing criminal labels is justified as a form of punishment. It begins by arguing that making criminal labels public is inevitably stigmatizing and that stigmatization is not, as is often implied, a defining aspect of censure, but needs independent justification. It argues that justifying grounds for public criminal labelling cannot be found in either the communicative account of punishment or deterrence theory. Rather, public criminal labelling should be unders…Read more
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110The Relative Moral Risks of Untargeted and Targeted SurveillanceEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2): 187-207. 2014.Is surveillance that is targeted towards specific individuals easier to justify than surveillance that targets broad categories of people? Untargeted surveillance is routinely accused of treating innocent people as suspects in ways that are unfair and of failing to pursue security effectively. I argue that in a wide range of cases untargeted surveillance treats people less like suspects than more targeted alternatives. I also argue that it often deters unwanted behaviour more effectively than ta…Read more
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