In stable political environments, closed-circuit television (CCTV) networks, digital monitoring systems, and biometric databases serve as constitutive elements of what sociologists term “formal social control.” They operate not merely through the detection of deviance but through the presumption of permanent visibility: the surveilled subject modifies behaviour in anticipation of observation. Modern states extend this gaze into previously private domains. Under peacetime conditions, total surveillance ostensibly underwrites public order by deterring crime, legitimising state authority, and providing evidentiary accountability.

The wartime context fundamentally reverses this relationship. A striking empirical illustration emerged in March 2026, when Israeli authorities were reported to have physically removed CCTV cameras across different territories, not to protect citizens from surveillance, but to conceal the extent of damage sustained from Iranian missile strikes. The apparatus of total surveillance — designed to observe and discipline the population — was dismantled by the very state that constructed it, in order to manage the state’s own information environment. This episode crystallises what may be termed the sovereign surveillance paradox: in conditions of existential threat, the state suppresses its own panoptic infrastructure to preserve the appearance of security — and, by extension, the legitimacy of its social control project.

From a criminological standpoint, this dynamic raises profound questions. First, it exposes the ideological dimension of surveillance: CCTV systems are not neutral instruments of order but political technologies whose deployment and removal are subject to calculations of power. Second, it illustrates how war produces a condition of norm suspension in which the legal and institutional frameworks governing social control are subordinated to military imperatives. Criminality and deviance do not disappear in wartime; rather, their definition, measurement, and governance are radically transformed. Ordinary crime statistics become unreliable, prosecutorial capacity collapses, and informal social control mechanisms (community solidarity, collective punishment, vigilante justice) rush in to fill the institutional vacuum.

The deliberate dismantling of surveillance infrastructure under conditions of armed conflict compels criminologists to reconsider the relationship between visibility, power, and order. Total surveillance, far from being the apotheosis of social control, is revealed as a contingent and reversible technology — one that states deploy in peacetime to govern populations and abandon, selectively, when its panoptic logic threatens to expose the state’s own vulnerabilities. War, in this sense, does not merely destroy institutions of social control: it strips them of their pretence.

The system created is a multi-level mechanism of total monitoring that combines various control technologies:

At the border, in cooperation with the FSB, initial collection of biometric data is carried out – fingerprints, photographs, a complete biometric profile of the person. At the migration centre, the migrant’s samples are taken – a procedure that goes far beyond administrative necessity and turns a person into an object of biological cataloguing.

A special spy programme is installed’ into the migrant’s phone, which continuously tracks their movements – night and day, recording their every step and every location. This programme creates a complete digital shadow of the person, where their physical presence in the real world is instantly duplicated in the digital space of control.

Electronic cards are issued, which integrate all the collected information and are automatically verified against data from the Federal Tax Service, law enforcement agencies and other government agencies. A single digital profile is created, combining all aspects of a person’s life in a single database.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, developing Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon – an ideal prison where a single guard can observe all prisoners without being seen himself – showed how the architecture of surveillance shapes a society of discipline. The Moscow system goes further: it creates a Panopticon without walls, where surveillance becomes continuous and comprehensive. While in Bentham’s concept, prisoners could be under surveillance, which in itself forced them to behave as if they were being watched all the time, modern technologies make surveillance absolute and continuous.

The key difference: in the classic Panopticon, there was at least a theoretical possibility of avoiding the gaze of the overseer, of finding ‘grey areas’. In the digital Panopticon, such areas do not exist – GPS tracking, biometric identification and genomic databases create a system where every person becomes completely transparent to the state.

When George Orwell wrote his novel in 1948, he created a warning about a future where a totalitarian state controls every aspect of citizens’ lives through television screens, the Thought Police, and a system of continuous surveillance. The slogan ‘Big Brother is watching you’ symbolised a society where privacy is destroyed and individuality is suppressed.

The Moscow experiment demonstrates that reality can surpass even the boldest artistic imagination. Orwellian television screens seem primitive compared to smartphones with built-in spyware. The Thought Police are giving way to artificial intelligence algorithms that analyse behavioural patterns in real time. The system is not just becoming all-seeing – it is becoming predictive, capable of modelling future behaviour based on collected data.

It is particularly telling how Sobyanin presents this system – not as a necessary measure or a temporary experiment, but as an innovative achievement, a source of pride. He emphasises that ‘such an innovative and powerful system of control over migrants, which Moscow is creating, is almost unheard of in other countries’ – as if the absence of such systems in democratic countries is their shortcoming, rather than a conscious ethical choice.

This rhetoric normalises total surveillance, presenting it as technological progress rather than a threat to fundamental human rights. When the mayor of the capital openly praises a system that tracks every move a person makes day and night, we are not just witnessing a violation of rights – we are seeing a society that has lost the very concept of privacy as a value.

The history of totalitarian regimes demonstrates a universal pattern: control systems that are initially introduced for ‘special categories’ of the population — foreigners, suspects, marginalised groups — inevitably expand to all citizens. Migration control becomes a testing ground for technologies that are later applied to the population itself.

When the state creates an infrastructure of total surveillance, it does not limit itself to its initial goals. A system capable of tracking every step of a migrant can just as easily track every step of any citizen. Technology has no internal limitations – only political will determines the scope of its application.

For Ukraine, which is engaged in an existential struggle against Russian imperialism, the Moscow experiment has a double meaning. First, it demonstrates the nature of the regime we are fighting against – a system where people are turned into objects of total control, deprived of their basic rights and dignity. Second, it serves as a warning: in the process of military mobilisation and strengthening security, we must remain vigilant so as not to borrow the enemy’s methods under the pretext of necessity.

Orwell’s warning remains relevant: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And when ‘Big Brother’ moves from literary metaphor to technological reality, this vigilance becomes not just desirable – it becomes a condition for preserving human dignity in the digital age.

African Americans and police brutality

Americans of all races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, poor and working-class white people expressed frustration over discriminatory policing in northern cities. At about the same time, Jewish and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe also complained of police brutality against their communities.

In the 1920s many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime.

In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos).

Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement.

And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.

Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is antiblack racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.
Whereas racism is thought to be a major cause of police brutality directed at African Americans and other ethnic groups, it is far from the only one.

Other factors concern the unique institutional culture of urban police departments, which stresses group solidarity, loyalty, and a “show of force” approach to any perceived challenge to an officer’s authority. For rookie officers, acceptance, success, and promotion within the department depend upon adopting the attitudes, values, and practices of the group, which historically have been infused with antiblack racism.

Because African Americans have been the primary — though certainly not the only — target of police brutality in the United States, the remainder of this article will deal mainly with their experiences, both historically and in the present day.

The Great Migration

Interactions between African Americans and urban police departments were initially shaped by the Great Migration (1916–1970) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, especially following World War II.

Most white communities, including white police departments, were unaccustomed to the presence of African Americans and reacted to their increasing numbers with fear and hostility, attitudes that were exacerbated by deeply ingrained racist stereotypes. Reflecting the beliefs of many whites, northern police departments acted upon the presumption that African Americans, and especially African American men, possessed an inherent tendency toward criminal behavior, one that required constant surveillance of African Americans and restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety. Accordingly, by the mid-1950s many urban police departments had implicitly reconceived their missions as essentially that of policing African Americans — i.e., protecting whites against Blacks.

The forms of police brutality to which this situation gave rise were variable and generally not limited to physical assault (e.g., beatings) and excessive use of force. They also included unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police). Police were also sometimes complicit in drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling within African American neighborhoods.

Although police brutality against African Americans had become a serious problem in many urban areas by the mid-20th century, most whites remained unaware of it until about the mid-1960s, in large part because most large-city newspapers (whose readerships were primarily white) did not consider it newsworthy. In contrast, incidences of police brutality were regularly covered in the Black press from the early 20th century, frequently in front-page articles. Likewise, local and national civil rights organizations collected thousands of affidavits and letters from African Americans documenting their direct experiences of police brutality.

Police brutality after World War II

For a variety of reasons, incidences of police brutality against African Americans became more frequent and more intense throughout the country in the decades following World War II. First, the victory of the forces of democracy in the war overseas created among African Americans expectations of greater freedom and democracy at home, especially as many of them had served in combat in the U.S. armed forces (albeit in racially segregated units).

As Black Americans began to assert their formal rights and liberties, demanding that they be respected by local governments, judiciaries, and law-enforcement agencies, their demands had the effect of reinforcing the tendency of white police officers to view themselves as protectors of white communities.

Second, the migration of rural whites to nearby cities in search of better economic opportunities encouraged police to view their own violence against African Americans as a more acceptable means of control than the mob hysteria that rural whites had been accustomed to and that urban spaces simply did not allow. In effect, police brutality replaced lynchings as a means of oppressing Blacks.

During this period, white supremacist and terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council operated openly in Southern cities, where police brutality against African Americans was abetted by government and political leaders, district attorneys, and judges, among others.

Third, in other cities, especially in the North, the flight of whites to the suburbs and the natural growth of the African American population made African Americans more visible and allowed them to be more mobile within formerly white areas.

Such demographic changes made African Americans as a group appear more threatening to white police officers and allowed the latter to more easily justify extralegal tactics as a means of controlling African Americans’ mobility and limiting their use of public spaces.

Fourth, beginning in the 1970s, African Americans who had joined local police forces in large numbers as a result of aggressive recruitment and affirmative action programs themselves committed serious acts of brutality against African American civilians, in part because they wished to be seen as “good cops” and to be otherwise accepted within their departments.

Finally, the escalation of urban crime rates in the 1970s and ’80s, including in predominantly African American and other minority neighborhoods, strengthened the perception among white police officers and whites generally of African Americans as inherently criminal, a trend also reflected in a newly racially charged political and policy discourse, referred to by critics as the criminalization of the Black poor and working class.

Police brutality and race riots

From the 1960s, police brutality was a catalyst for many of the race riots (riots caused by racial dissensions or hatreds) that took place in urban America, including the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Detroit Riot of 1967. In 1980 the Liberty City section of Miami erupted over the police killing of an unarmed African American man.

During a period of three days, 18 people were killed and some 1,000 arrested, and more than $100 million in property damage was committed.

Twelve years later the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and their subsequent acquittal on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force triggered the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, still considered the worst race riots in American history.

During a period of four days, more than 50 people were killed and more than 2,300 were injured, and property damage was estimated at about $1 billion.

In 2014 the fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and a grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict the officer on criminal charges provoked rioting in that city.

Later race riots (along with peaceful demonstrations) followed the deaths in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland (2015), and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2020), both of whom were African American.

Antibrutality campaigns

Most victims of police brutality, including not only African Americans but also whites and other ethnic groups, have come from the ranks of the poor and low-income working classes. They have consequently lacked significant political influence or the financial resources that are sometimes necessary to effectively publicize complaints of police brutality.

Nevertheless, antibrutality campaigns have been mounted in nearly every major U.S. city with a sizable Black population. In sometimes large demonstrations, members of victimized communities have demanded, in addition to an end to police brutality and accountability for guilty officers, major reforms including the hiring of more African American police officers and the placement of more African American officers in supervisory positions, racially integrated patrols or Black-only patrols in African American neighborhoods, civilian review boards, and federal investigation (e.g., by the Justice Department) of egregious cases of police brutality. Their tactics have included sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and close monitoring of police activity, including (from the late 20th century) by means of videos taken with handheld cameras and mobile telephones.

In 2013 the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, led to the founding of a powerful social movement, Black Lives Matter. The movement subsequently played a prominent role in nationwide protests following extreme acts of police brutality against African Americans. In retaliatory attacks in 2016, five white members of the Dallas, Texas, police department and three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot and killed.

Antibrutality campaigns tended to be led by activists at the grassroots level and by other members of the communities directly affected rather than by more-established civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, whose memberships were drawn primarily from the Black middle class.

Indeed, Black middle-class support for antibrutality protests was often limited, largely because, like their white counterparts, middle-class Blacks generally favored tough crime-fighting measures to protect themselves and their property from Black criminals. Because they were relatively inexperienced as leaders, however, antibrutality activists often used direct and confrontational methods, preferring street protests over negotiations.

And because they generally lacked an institutional base and a clear strategy, they were often reactionary, acting in an ad hoc fashion and creating organizations and developing constituencies as the need arose.

Despite such limitations, they were usually effective, because they articulated the anger of their constituencies, who were generally suspicious of electoral politics (“the system”) and who had no faith that Black politicians would adequately address their concerns.

The International Day of Police Cooperation highlights the importance of working together for public safety, crime prevention and human rights. Through its community security work in over 40 crisis-affected areas, UNDP has shown that transforming police to focus on people’s needs makes the biggest impact.

In Gambisara, The Gambia, community policing, supported by UNDP, has made a real difference. “Not a day went by without theft, rape, or domestic violence before the initiative,” said Ali Bongo, a leader of the community policing volunteers. Now, crime is down, and life is safer.”

Across all regions, especially in crisis- or conflict-affected settings, it is essential for police to operate in partnership with communities and build trust. Achieving this requires integrity, transparency and accountability within law enforcement. People need to trust that police officers will be held responsible for excessive force or human rights violations, and that requires strong oversight.

In countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lebanon, Nigeria, and Venezuela, UNDP is helping governments build digital platforms, design codes of conduct and policies that are a must to ensure police accountability. In DRC, a new provincial oversight department is responsible for control and internal investigations, while in Lebanon, over 390 municipalities are part of a reform that promotes community policing, oversight and accountability.

In Iraq, model police stations offer “one-stop shop” services that are accessible and people-centred. In these locations, UNDP-commissioned surveys revealed that these innovations have boosted public trust and doubled crime reporting, including cases of violence against women and children. UNDP has trained 2,290 police trainers, including 120 female trainers, to foster effective policing and community engagement. The trainings cascaded engaging over 6,000 officers across the country.  

Digitalization when smart and human rights-based, can also improve the delivery of police services, optimize resources and combat impunity. UNDP supported the digitalization of police departments in DRC, The Gambia, Grenada, Honduras, Nigeria, Pakistan and beyond.

In Honduras, UNDP supported a new digital platform to analyze risk factors and indicators of v*iolence and insecurity across 298 municipalities. In Grenada, UNDP and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) championed the Police Force Goes High Tech initiative. A new information system is helping police shift from paper-based to digital reporting, improving crime monitoring and data management.

Partnerships and an integrated approach are essential for the success of police reforms. Together with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UNDP co-chairs the UN Global Focal Point for the Rule of Law (GFP). The GFP provides expertise and catalytic-funding and reinforces a One-UN approach to reduce violence, protect human rights, restore justice and security for people affected by crisis and conflict. 

Through the GFP, UNDP is driving reforms in DRC, Haiti, Mali, Somalia and South Sudan. In Haiti, where armed gangs control 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, UNDP supports the Haitian National Police (HNP) in partnership with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the UN Integrated Office in Haiti. This initiative enhances citizen security, aims to expand police presence and strengthen its capacity to control armed gangs, as well as to improve border control. 

People-centered policing brings real change, even in the toughest situations. When accountable and professional police represent communities they serve, they can build trust, improve safety, and pave the way for sustainable peace and development.

The new Network, which is co-convened by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, fielded a team of seven legal observers to observe the policing of a pro-Palestine demonstration. 

The observers monitored gardaí as they, without justification, restrained and dispersed protesters using force and incapacitant (pepper spray). The report finds that actions of members of An Garda Síochána were in violation of garda policies and also Ireland’s international human rights obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. 

This is the first report produced by the Network, established this year to monitor the policing of protests around Ireland. The report is published on the ICCL website and can be found here.

Therefore, it can be presumed that even the second generation of police officers will have a punitive style of thinking. It is clear that these generations of police officers will need more time to adapt themselves to peacetime policing based on human rights standards of the Council of Europe and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. Considering the time limits and a lack of material resources on the police, the issue of the training of police officers can be very problematic.

Moreover, we have all grounds to presume that not only time and financial resources should be considered. One of the sharpest aspects of postwar Ukrainian policing has a purely psychological nature.

It is obvious the police force of Ukraine will be recruited mostly from the former military officers and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition to the absence of proper knowledge and skills on how to communicate with people in the post-War society, they are expected to rely on the autocratic and harsh style of policing rather on the dialogue with citizens.

Consequently, such a situation will lead to a bigger gap between the police and the society.

Moreover, one more aspect must be considered here.

The majority of police officers – regardless of their age – will be former military officers or police officers directly involved in the military actions. Even now, many police officers participate in military actions on the basis of regular rotation.

Even those who are not involved in military actions participate in joint actions with military staff of the military recruiting centres, performing purely punitive actions with a zero level of trust by the population.

In the case of former military officers and police officers involved in direct armed hostilities, it is obvious that they will be reluctant to follow traditional methods of police training. Moreover, there is a real danger that such police officers can even sabotage human-rights oriented police strategies in the postwar Ukrainian society.

Consequently, such a situation shapes a problem which has to be solved ​w​ith new innovative methods of training of police officers adapted to the needs of the last two generations of police officers.