Mediated Proximity: Community Policing in the Digital Age

1. Introduction

As social media platforms have started to play an increasing role in everyday life, police activities have followed suit to ensure public order and safety online (Schneider, 2016). The growing use of social media by governments and official agencies has a diverse range of implications covering a variety of subfields and has been the subject of many studies in recent decades (Lee et al., 2013; Mawby, 2002; Schneider, 2016). Social media are often described as having unique potential to create new forms of engagement and interaction with the public (Schneider, 2016, p. 4). As a result, police engagement with civil society via social media is seen as having the potential to transform the relationship between “the public, the police image and police legitimacy” (Schneider, 2016; Lee et al., 2014). For example, police services worldwide have for decades used the new possibilities offered by social media to communicate with the public on various matters of concern (Lee et al., 2013). Information and communication technologies are, therefore, quickly changing how the police conduct “image work” via social media platforms (Mawby, 2002, p. 177; Goldsmith, 2010). These technologies also provide greater opportunities for the public to reveal cases of police misconduct (Schneider, 2016). In other words, the technology makes it possible to affect public trust in the police in radically new ways due to the new types of “mediated visibility” of police activities (Ellis, 2021; Goldsmith, 2010; Schneider, 2016; Thompson, 1995). This article relates to these previous studies on policing and social media and how new information and communication technologies have affected police work. Nevertheless, the specific focus of the article is online policing. Online policing is an umbrella concept for a variety of operative police tasks involving Internet-related activities and actions designed to prevent or investigate crime (Bowling et al., 2019; Bullock, 2018; Gundhus et al., 2019). The emphasis is, therefore, on the perspective of police officers when engaging with the public via social media platforms in attempts to prevent and investigate both online and offline criminal conduct. Online policing takes multiple forms. According to the Norwegian scholar Inger Marie Sunde, a taxonomy of online policing would include behaviour that is either 1) open and uniformed – understood as work where the police are visible and recognisable actors. On the other hand, online policing can also be 2) closed/undercover, understood as clandestine intelligence gathering (Sunde, 2019). Online policing can also be either A) active, in the sense that the police are mainly proactive, initiate the work and address crimes occurring now or in the future or B) passive, in the sense that they are mainly reactive in response to events (Sunde, 2019). This article explores online police patrols. The purpose of online police patrols is most often articulated as general crime prevention. Using the taxonomy above, they are best described as an open, uniformed and mainly active presence. As outlined already, previous studies of online policing have focused mainly on social media as either sources of image work or sources of information in criminal investigations (Rønn et al., 2021; Schneider, 2016). Operational police work has become almost inseparable from the reputation management and image work of police forces, and as stated by Lee and McGovern, “the representation of policing is policing – or at least a simulation or simulacra of traditional policing” (Lee et al., 2014, p. 72). Hence, online police patrols constitute illustrative examples of this collapse between operational policing and image work. Despite, widespread political attention, operational, online police patrols aimed mainly at crime prevention are, however, still a new and under-researched phenomenon (Ralph, 2021).

Based on interviews and participatory field observations with Norwegian officers, this article presents empirical findings related to the core perceptions and performances of online police patrols. The study reveals that the officers involved share an emphasis on localism and proximity when engaging with the public in activities that mainly target crime prevention. Although previous studies on the impact of social media on policing have found that it has been transformed by the logic of social media platforms, for example, by adapting to the formats they take (Schneider, 2016), this study in the first part reveals how crime prevention, localism and proximity still mainly employ traditional perceptions and logic from within the police organisation. In the second part of the article, I suggest mediated proximity as a concept for describing how the online patrols also exploits or adapts to the promise and potential of social media such as being local and near in a non-geographical space such as on the chat platform Discord. The article concludes with a discussion of the way forward for online police patrols and the feasibility of building and maintaining public trust via them, which the officers involved generally see as a key aspect of their work.

To create an understanding of the specific context of the study, the next section recounts how online police patrols were established and have evolved in Norway.

2. Background: The rise of the Norwegian online police patrols

In 2015, the National Cybercrime Centre in Norway (NC3) set up a section for online policing.¹ They started out by creating a national Facebook account to post information to the public and receive chat messages. Even though various police districts had Twitter and Facebook accounts before this – mainly in communication departments – such channels for communicating with the public and doing operational and “real police work” online were new at the time. At first, both overt and covert police presence were anchored in the same section of the National Police, but they soon found that the necessary work and competencies differed significantly and they split into two sections. The online patrols became a part of an open section called Online Police Presence (“Tilstedeværelse på nett”). In 2018, all 12 police districts in Norway set up their own patrols (“Nettpatrulje”). In organisational terms, most of them fell under the auspices of sections for crime prevention. Each district operates on Facebook, and some are also on Instagram and TikTok to reach different audiences in different age groups. Currently, most of their work is articulated as 1) building trust, 2) preventing crime, and 3) receiving tips from local people and passing them on to investigative or intelligence units.

At a national level, the online police patrols in Norway are said to be moving into stage two, where the scope of the work is changing, for example, more proactive patrols that visit online groups on their own initiative, for instance on the chat platform Discord. This work is more like street patrols – letting people know they risk being caught if they break the law and emphasising that the Internet is not a lawless space.

The main focus of this study is on the perception and performance of online crime prevention and how online patrols in police districts see their role. However, it also covers some of the new initiatives involved when setting up proactive online patrols. Before moving on to the findings, the following section presents the studyʼs methodology and research design.

3. Methodology

The study is based on three pre-interviews, seven semi-structured interviews (350 minutes in total) and approximately 40 hours of participatory field observation in 2021/2022. The three pre-interviews were with officers in Denmark and Norway to generate general background information on the set-up and scope of online patrols, i.e., how they differ from and overlap with existing initiatives on social media platforms. The seven main interviews were conducted in three (out of 12) police districts in Norway. The three districts are diverse in terms of geography and population size. I also conducted interviews at the National Cybercrime Centre (NC3). These interviewees were chosen according to the key informant strategy (Tremblay, 1957), the point of which was to identify interviewees with specialist knowledge of the subject, who would then help identify similar individuals in the organisation. Six interviewees were online police patrol officers – all trained as police officers in Norway (three males and three females of various ages and levels of professional experience within the police) – and one of the interviewees was a civilian manager in the national section for online police presence. All in all, the choice of interviewees was designed to elicit a variety of views about the role, focus and scope of online police patrols in Norway. The focus of the interviews was to gain police-centric and insider perspectives on perceptions and experiences of the patrols. Ideally, it would have been relevant to compare the police-centric perceptions of the role and mandate of online patrols with the perceptions and experiences of people who have been in contact with them. This was, however, beyond the scope of the study, and the article compares my findings with other studies, which include public perceptions of online police presence. The interviews were structured around the following themes: 1) the perceived purpose; 2) the operationalisation of the purpose (priorities and expertise); 3) the lines and types of communication with the public; 4) the success criteria; 5) the differences and similarities between online and physical police patrols; 6) competencies of the officers on online patrols; and 7) the future of online patrols. The National Police Directorate approved the study in January 2022, and participants gave their free and informed consent to participate. The author transcribed all interviews after the data collection, and the data material was then analysed using the thematic analysis method (Attride-Sterling, 2002). This method usually involves three broad stages, which include: “(a) the breakdown of the text”, which often entails a familiarisation with and coding of the data; “(b) the exploration of the text”, which includes the generation of general themes and the revision of these themes; and “(c) the integration of the exploration” which includes the definition of the themes and writing up the analysis (Attride-Sterling, 2002, p. 390). The first stage of analysing the data entailed the inductive coding of the transcripts (Tjora, 2021). In stage two, the interview material generated four general themes, which were addressed in all of the interviews: (1) online localism, (2) monologic vs dialogic means of online communication, (3) authority without power and (4) excluded expertise. This article reports only on the first theme (online localism). The empirical material about the theme was subsequently deductively coded, applying the sub-themes: (A) local anchoring; (B) local police tasks; (C) local ways of policing; (D) non-local online activities. The scope of this coding was to revise the general theme by identifying perspectives on the perceptions of the core scope of the patrols. The third stage entailed writing up these themes, as exemplified in this article by quotes illustrating some of the most central aspects of the themes identified. The participatory field observations took place in NC3 and in one police district in Norway in 2022. The field observations included attending meetings, sitting beside officers on online patrols while they performed their everyday duties, and taking part in a gaming event at NC3. Field notes were taken during these days and events, which are reported mainly as supplements to the interview material in this article. All quotes are anonymised and translated into English by the author and referred to as Interviewees 1, 2, 3 … 7 (I1, I2, I3 … I7). Translating empirical material into English entails potential validity pitfalls since the original meaning might be skewed (Nes et al., 2010). I have attempted to avoid this pitfall by only translating the relevant quotes and doing all the coding and analysis in the original language. In the next section, I present the main findings of the study about the core local scope and focus of online police patrols in Norway.

4. Online localism: Business as usual?

One of the main findings of the study is that localism recurs in the interviews as a cornerstone of the Norwegian online police patrols. The emphasis on localism is evident in both the organisational design of the patrols and in the work and methods deemed relevant by the officers involved. This section fleshes out the perception and performance of online localism and compares it to how localism is perceived and performed in other forms of policing. A central argument in the section is, therefore, that online localism, to a large degree, resembles the objectives of community policing. Before fleshing out this argument, I will briefly sketch the crucial aspects of community policing and localism in recent scholarly literature.

Localism, or local policing in the Scandinavian context, has been articulated as a form of community policing (Diderichsen, 2022; Balvig et al., 2004). Community policing has developed as a strategy during the past decades (Manning, 2010). Originally considered a strategy to engage civil society in policing priorities and bring the public closer to the force (Moore et al., 2003; Sklansky, 2008), it has evolved into a synonym for policing in geographically local areas – at least in the Scandinavian context (Diderichsen, 2022; Balvig et al., 2004).

In recent Scandinavian policing literature, Adam Diderichsen (2022) articulates three common points about localism. These three specific features of local policing are A) local anchoring, B) specific local police tasks, and C) specific local ways of policing (Diderichsen, 2022, p. 17). Local anchoring refers to the proximity of the police to the public – understood as the geographical situatedness of the police in the physical community where the police work takes place. The local police tasks are specific types of police work traditionally considered “local”, such as policing minor and everyday crime, for example, breach of the peace in the local community (Diderichsen, 2022). Specific local ways of policing are, for example, crime prevention and an emphasis on building relationships of trust with the public to make local people feel safe (Diderichsen, 2022). In the following, I will relate these three perceptions to how online localism is perceived and performed by online patrols. I will do this in order to identify how online policing relates to the traditional ways of performing localism when policing on the streets. When reporting on the study findings below, I focus mainly on activities initiated by the online patrols (e.g., by posting on social media – mostly Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok). However, I also relate it to communication between individuals and the police, which is usually instigated by the public via the chat functions on social media platforms.

5. Online police patrols: Reproducing the ideal of community policing

As presented above, one of the main findings of the study is the emphasis on locally anchored, community-based policing logic in the expressed perceptions and performances of online police patrols by the officers concerned. Local recognisability and accessibility are also considered pivotal to online patrolling and the core ideal of community policing (at least in the way it is perceived in the Scandinavian context), where equal, positive, and locally anchored relationships are crucial, e.g. to successful crime prevention and general police activity (Diderichsen, 2022; Gundhus et al., 2014).

This tendency to replicate the established organisational logic of police organisation when faced with new challenges, strategies or technologies comes as no surprise when my findings are related to other studies by scholars such as Gundhus (2012) and Hestehave (2021). At the same time, the emphasis on localism and local anchoring may seem somewhat paradoxical given the global nature of the Internet and the international platforms used by online patrols, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Discord. Schneider also writes in his comprehensive work on policing and social media that policing is usually transformed and framed by social media and that forces tend to adopt the format and logic of the platforms when interacting with the public (Schneider, 2016). Despite the transforming potential of new information and communications technologies on police practices (Chan, 2001), the core scope and aim of online patrols generally remains unaltered despite the new potential for them. As a result, online police patrols become more of an extension, a supplement or an evolution of sources and methods of traditional policing in physical spaces rather than a revolution of police patrols in online ones.

In the section below, I will discuss other ways of perceiving and performing online police patrolling in ways that seek to exploit the core nature and transform the potential of the online sphere to a greater extent.

6. Exploiting online potential: Rethinking online police patrols

Online platforms have entered the public sphere with a promise of enabling dialogue between the police and the people and of generating greater public engagement with police work (Schneider, 2016; Lee et al., 2014). However, as also identified in various empirical studies on policing and social media, the police do not necessarily exploit the full potential of social media platforms. The British scholar Karen Bullock, for example, found that most police communication on social media in the UK was still one-way – sending information out to the public instead of engaging in dialogue (Bullock, 2018).

In the following, I will present examples of how online Norwegian police patrols also attempt to move away from the traditional conceptualisations of police patrols when working online.

The emphasis on local anchoring and presence in communities corresponding to the geographical borders of police districts might appear somewhat surprising, given the non-physical nature of the Internet. Among other things, the Internet and information and communication technologies are characterised by a new “connectivity”, i.e., between people who do not necessarily live in the same physical community (Schneider, 2016, p. 27).

A different way of understanding localism and proximity could be by emphasising police presence in local communities without geographical borders (Wahlquist, 2021), deploying instead the new lines of networked connectivity between people facilitated by social media. The local online patrols, as well as the national one in Norway, have recently begun to focus on these kinds of non-geographical local communities, and the online patrols visit and interact with people in these interest-driven communities, where the topics of mutual interest are detached from the design of the local, physical spaces. Such “local” communities exist, for example, in particular online communities on specific servers on Discord, where people meet up and chat about topics of mutual interest (field notes; I5, I6).

This kind of local and proximity-oriented online policing is evident, for example, when online patrols interact with the public via Discord or game and chat with youngsters in online sessions of games like Fortnite (the patrols engage in actual gaming and communicate through the oral chat functions). In both Discord and Fortnite (as well as other multi-player platform games), online patrols facilitate dialogue and are crucial in terms of what is considered acceptable communication and topics of interaction. On the online police patrolsʼ Discord server, the police define the “rules of engagement” (which are specified when logging in): they can, for example, give a person a time-out in the online room for unacceptable conduct (field notes). The dialogue is not necessarily about crime-related topics and thereby does not necessarily have to fulfil the core ideal of community policing, i.e. of engaging the public in policing matters. Instead, these platforms are better viewed as online channels for everyday small talk between online officers and ordinary people. As such, this type of interaction might best be understood as part of the measures to build trust and relationships by online patrols – just not in a specific geographical setting. The aim of such activities is similar to the locally anchored policing activities of the traditional patrols, such as establishing relationships by “humanising” police activities (via gaming sessions) and emphasising proximity, accessibility and a feeling of safety among the “local” people in online spaces.

However, such online police patrolling activities create radically different opportunities in terms of creating a “shared common”, which the interviewees express as the centre of communication between the public and the police. A new type of online police patrolling is slowly taking shape, which seeks to a greater extent to exploit the potential of the online nature and set-up of social media platforms. By introducing the term mediated proximity, I am suggesting a concept that will capture the scope of local and community-based policing but in a non-locally anchored setting. Mediated proximity refers to the scope of online gaming sessions and chatting on various servers, e.g. Discord, and the belief in building relationships, establishing trust between authorities and the public and facilitating crime prevention without physical meetings. Mediated proximity draws on a conceptualisation of greater “mediated visibility” of the police via various Internet-based platforms, as argued, for example, by Thompson, Myles and Trottier (Myles et al., 2017; Thompson, 2011). However, striving to achieve mediated proximity between the police and the public differs from the core visibility widely discussed when the police first started to use social media (Schneider, 2016; Lee et al., 2014). Mediated proximity refers to more than the typically one-way, online communication of the police services and reflects the core potential for the active engagement of the public in police crime prevention activities and for making people feel safe in online spaces.

These types of activities are very new and, therefore, little is known about outcomes, impact and potential downsides. Some of the interviewees point out potential pitfalls related to the lack of experience with the online domain. Whereas street patrols often know every corner of the district, online patrols, know very little of the online landscape, which also constantly changes. Interviewee 6 expresses the challenge posed by the dynamic nature of the online architecture:

It [the Internet] is so big. We need to set ourselves limits. But I think of it in the same way as in a local area or district. The more experience we have with it, the more we know about the various challenges faced in that specific area. Itʼs the same on the Internet. (…) However, on the Internet, new “areas”, “districts” and “cities” can arise overnight, so we constantly need to familiarise ourselves with new online spaces (I6).

The new possibilities and challenges associated with moving police work online are evident when we think about the sheer size of the Internet and the amount of possible online “street corners” and interest-driven communities the police could potentially visit. In addition to awareness of the size of this new police district, interviewee 5 also highlights awareness of not reproducing well-known anomalies of police discretion from police patrolling in physical spaces into the online sphere (i.e., stereotyping). As a result, I5 calls for awareness of the ability to provide good reasons and arguments for choosing a specific online focus area or “interest-driven community” when detaching online patrols from local anchoring at district level.

This section has presented new online pathways which are currently being explored as new channels for online police patrolling. In addition to serving as a supplement to locally anchored crime prevention in each police district, online patrols reflect an emerging tendency to initiate activities that strive consciously to establish mediated proximity vis-à-vis the public in interest-driven online spaces. In the next section, I will conclude with a discussion of the feasibility of mediated proximity and of the core ideal of building trust expressed by online officers.

7. Concluding discussion: Building public trust online

For decades, various types of media have played a key role in establishing and maintaining relationships between the police and the public (Thompson, 1995), and the explosive growth of social media has provided new opportunities and pitfalls (Lee et al. 2014). Manningʼs original distinction between “police work” and “image work” has collapsed due to the inherent focus on visibility in the “mass media society”, as argued, for example, by Mawby (2002, p. 180). Online police patrols constitute an apt example of this collapse. They have a foot in each camp, and their work involves entangled elements of both police and image work. In this sense, online police patrols are adequate examples of so-called simulated policing where the immaterial and disembodied part of policing, which usually characterises the image work of police forces, have become integrated into operational policing (Lee et al., 2014, p. 72). This intersecting collapse is exactly also captured in the concept of mediated proximity, denoting the element of visibility and engagement potentially available online on the one hand and the ideal of proximity, localness, recognisability, and familiarity on the other hand, which are expressed in existing local and community and policing strategies in physical spaces.

Interestingly, a recurring theme in all the interviews for this study is the firm belief in the potential for online police patrols to build trust. As already pointed out, this belief is manifested, for example, in the emphasis on establishing close relationships, signposting accessibility and underlining local recognisability of the activities which are addressed by the patrols. The underlying assumption expressed by the online officers is that if the police, in general, are considered accessible and approachable – including online – then it will affect the public perception of trust in the force. So, from the perspective of online officers, the predominant logic of their work is the feasibility of building trust vis-à-vis the public. Unfortunately, this study did not include the perspective of the public. However, the following relates my findings to other recent studies of online police patrolsʼ potential for building trust.

Liam Ralph (2021) has conducted comprehensive studies of the online presence of the Scottish police. He found that the extent to which the online presence maintains and ensures public trust is rather doubtful. He uses wide-ranging studies, including interviews with representatives of the public who have had various forms of interaction with online patrols, to argue that the public perception of policing is dependent on the perception people have of the police service in their physical spaces: “the current study shows that police legitimacy on social media changes depending on how people understand the role of the police in physical spaces.” (Ralph, 2021, p. 9). Ralph mainly addresses the implications of online police patrols for police legitimacy and not specifically for public trust. However, he defines legitimacy by referring to Bottoms and Tankebeʼs (2012) “dialogic” approach to police legitimacy, which posits that it is a constant negotiation between “power holders” and their “audience” (Ralph, 2021, p. 3; Bottoms et al., 2012). Public trust in the police is often used interchangeably with police legitimacy (Taylor, 2004) and generally entails similar dialogic dynamics as legitimacy. Public trust in police forces is usually also considered relational and refers to the good reasons on the part of the public to grant (or not grant) the authority or power their trust (Petit, 1995). In the context of policing, Tom Taylorʼs finding concerning the importance of procedural justice (rather than material justice) in the granting of public trust to police forces has become widely recognised in the literature on police legitimacy and public trust (Tyler, 2004). The emphasis on procedural fairness is also reflected in the importance expressed in the interviews of the online police patrols, making sure, for example, that the public is seen and heard, as argued above. However, the strong belief in the potential of online policing to build trust may also have limitations, as argued below.

According to Ralph (2021), online police patrols would not themselves be capable of changing the publicʼs perception of them since the publicʼs perception of trust in and legitimacy of the police reflects how it perceives the police in general, which is based on physical encounters with them.

If this argument is transferred to the case study in Norway, the online patrols would not by themselves be able to build or reinforce public trust since this is determined by predefined perceptions of the police in general. The interviewees in the Norwegian case, however, express a solid belief in the possibility of affecting public perception positively via online presence. As one of the interviewees puts it:

I have confidence in our ability to build public trust because of who we are and what we do. We [the online police patrol] can build and maintain trust on behalf of the force as a whole (I4).

This strong belief in the ability to build trust may be due to a high degree of perceived self-legitimacy amongst the “power holders”, i.e., the online officers, as expressed by Ralph (2021). The interviewees express a strong belief in the basic assumption underpinning online police patrols in Norway, which is the ability to exert a positive influence on the relationship between the police and the public via an online police presence. An interesting variable to take into account in this regard is whether the publicʼs response would be different depending on which population groups are asked. The reply to the question of whether online patrols are better at building and maintaining public trust may, therefore, depend on the audience. In Norway, the main target audiences for the online police patrols are children and young people, even though the police also operate on Facebook and Instagram, which appeal mainly to people aged 30+. Many of the young people who encounter online patrols (i.e., in gaming sessions and on Discord) do not necessarily have any (or very little) previous experience with the police from the physical world. The online patrols might be or become (over time) a natural part of their perception of what the police are, as opposed to the perceptions of older generations. This difference in audiences could be articulated as the distinction between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” (Bennet et al., 2008, p. 776–777; Wahlquist, 2021), where the natives would be more inclined to consider online patrols as their main source of encounters with the police. The audience-sensitive approach to the feasibility of building and maintaining public trust via online patrols is mere speculation on my part and calls for further studies of the influence of online police patrols on trust building with specific target groups.

Gundhus and Larsson (2014, p. 278) on the other hand argue that the increased digitalisation of the police generally leads to a greater distance between the police and the public, mainly due to the technical mediation of police work (via apps, iPad, etc.) instead of face-to-face encounters. In line with the claim above about the need for audience sensitivity when making claims about public trust, a relevant question is whether this digital distancing and the perception of physical encounters as “the gold standard” holds true for all parts of the public. As argued above, a main function of the online Norwegian police patrols, as expressed by the interviewees, is to provide the public with a feeling of online accessibility, proximity and safety. Whereas scholars working on the role of social media in policing have in the past emphasised the mediated nature of visibility in the context of policing, which is increasingly taking off in connection with the policeʼs use of social media (Schneider, 2016; Lee et al., 2014), my study reveals another endeavour, which I suggest represents an effort to strive for mediated proximity. The main aim of mediated proximity is to guarantee public trust in the police via online encounters. An interesting question to pose in future research would, therefore, be whether the attempt to provide mediated proximity is perceived differently by digital natives and immigrants simply because of the naturalness of online interaction. Additionally, it would be interesting to conduct comparative studies with online police endeavours in other countries. Hence, it might be the case that the strong belief in the feasibility of building trust among the online patrols in Norway is founded in the general high level of trust in public authorities compared with other European countries, and the cultural setting of the online police affects the feasibility of enhancing trust vis-à-vis the public. Finally, organisational scholars have highlighted the importance of “perceived proximity”, which insists on the importance of differentiating between subjective feelings of closeness (virtually or physically) rather than normative understandings of what constitutes proximity (Wilson et al., 2008; Kolb, 2013). Pursuing this approach, the striving expressed in the interviews for virtual or mediated proximity by the online patrols in order to establish and maintain trust vis-à-vis the public might work with certain types of audiences. However, I will leave this point for future studies of the feasibility of mediated proximity to debate.

Lastly, a point of attention and a response to this optimistic and strong belief in the feasibility of providing mediated proximity of the online police patrols might be found in Rob Mawbyʼs comprehensive work on police communication and legitimacy (2002). Generally, he found that the image work done by police forces via, for example, social media presence, often “supports and demonstrates” police legitimacy (Mawby, 2002, p. 190). However, he also argues that the image work via media channels might have a flipside, “masking” or “compensating” for a lack of public trust and police legitimacy (Mawby, 2002, p. 190). Since police work is increasingly mediated by various media (Schneider, 2012), online police patrols have a major responsibility in terms of not simply showing themselves from an over-exaggerated positive side in order to establish and maintain a flattering public image (Mawby, 2002). Hence, awareness of the responsibility and of the potential flipsides, i.e., compensating for a lack of trust by engaging online, might trigger reflexive awareness in the Norwegian patrols and their efforts to generate trust.