Policing the neighbourhood with social media: a comparative study of resident’s digital vigilantism in high-income neighbourhoods

As digitalisation becomes ubiquitous, urban residents increasingly use digital media to monitor suspicious behaviour, denounce alleged perpetrators, and enforce social order. This paper examines how residents of Mexico City’s high-income neighbourhoods employ social media platforms to practise zero-tolerance policing in coordination with local police. Drawing on ethnographic data, it compares the neighbourhood policing strategies of two cyber-activist groups and explains the conditions under which digitalisation enable resident-police cooperation in the penalisation of disorderly conduct. The findings reveal that social media platforms empower upper-class residents to engage in digital vigilantism, but only a particular, highly privileged group manages to systematically penalise suspected lawbreakers with the support of local law enforcement institutions. The paper underscores how the digitalisation of urban policing amplifies pre-existing economic and political inequalities and reinforces the uneven geographies of policing in Latin American cities.