Copwatch: turning phones into evidence, memory and accountability

At first glance, “Film the Police” could sound like the title of a provocative documentary. In Greece, it is something more practical and more urgent: a media and civic education project that helps people document police misconduct safely, systematically and in ways that can serve journalism, research, public debate and, where possible, legal accountability.

The project was developed by the Policing Observatory Non-Profit Company – Copwatch GR, Greece’s first independent police monitoring media outlet. What began in 2020 as a social media initiative responding to cases of police wrongdoing has grown into a registered non-profit, a platform and a reference point for communities, journalists and lawyers seeking reliable documentation of police violence in Greece.

Its existence reflects a widespread challenge of police misconduct. Police violence and misconduct are often hard to document, including when they affect marginalised communities, such as migrants and LGBT+ communities. When incidents are not documented, or when footage is scattered across private phones and individual social media accounts, patterns remain difficult to see. Individual experiences risk being dismissed as isolated events. Film the Police is designed to change that.

The immediate catalyst was the public mobilisation following Greece’s deadly 2023 train crash near Tempi, where 57 people lost their lives. As anger over the tragedy and failures in public infrastructure grew, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all over the country. During demonstrations, people raised their phones to record the police response. The footage was important, but it was also fragmented. “It was much more guerrilla than what was needed to create a body of knowledge,” as Chris Gioran puts it. He is part of Copwatch’s core team who saw both the potential and the weakness of this spontaneous documentation: citizens were willing to record, but they often lacked proper safety knowledge, legal clarity and a secure place to submit material.

“People filmed ad hoc, published on their own platforms. Nothing was structured. So as people mobilised to mark the two-year anniversary since the tragedy in 2025, Copwatch issued a call about filming the police – and that’s also when the idea about a guidebook and workshops were born,” explains Georgios Poulopoulos, the initiator of Film the Police and manager of Copwatch.

Funding from Pluralistic Media for Democracy ensured that later in the year, in September 2025, Copwatch could begin planning for the Film the Police initiative, which now combines an educational guide, targeted workshops and a secure digital platform for collecting, verifying, archiving and publishing citizen-generated audiovisual material.

A team sport

The impact begins with knowledge. The Film the Police guidebook translates Copwatch’s experience into practical advice on legal rights, preparation, filming techniques, safety, storage, archiving, metadata, self-care and ethical publication. It does not simply tell people to press record, it explains what makes footage useful: filming context before and after an incident, capturing landmarks or street signs, keeping a safe distance, preserving original files, avoiding edits that could weaken evidentiary value and protecting the identity of people who may be exposed by publication.

This practical focus matters because documentation can carry risks. A person filming alone at a demonstration can become vulnerable to intimidation, confiscation of equipment or arbitrary interference. Copwatch therefore promotes “collective filming” as both a safety practice and an accountability method. If one person records only the moment of confrontation, the footage may be contested. If several people film from different angles, the material can help reconstruct what happened before, during and after an incident. In the words of Georgios Poulopoulos: “recording police violence is a team sport.”

The workshops turn that methodology into community practice. With the PM4D funds, Copwatch planned 10 workshops with at least 100 participants over five months, tailoring the sessions to the realities of different groups. Photojournalists may already know much about their legal rights but still need stronger approaches to securely transferring and archiving. Migrant communities may face repeated document checks in their own neighbourhoods and need tools to show when repeated “random” checks form a pattern. Trans people may experience policing less through direct confrontation and more through absence of protection, unnecessary police presence or failure to intervene when harassment occurs in public spaces such as pride events.

By adapting the workshops to these different experiences, Copwatch moves beyond generic training. The sessions ask: what does documentation need to prove for this community? What risks do participants face? What kind of footage can help them tell their story without putting them in greater danger? This is where the project’s impact becomes concrete. It gives people a method for recognising that their individual experience may be part of a wider pattern – and a practical way to document that pattern.

The digital platform deepens this impact. Instead of leaving footage scattered across phones, message threads and social media posts, Film the Police provides a dedicated space where material can be submitted, assessed, mapped and preserved. The platform is designed to support secure submission, verification, anonymisation, metadata preservation and responsible publication. This allows Copwatch to move from highlighting single incidents to building a living archive of police violence and misconduct.

That archive is one of the project’s most important achievements. It creates public memory where memory has often been fragmented, contested or lost. Journalists can use it to identify cases and patterns. Researchers can study recurring practices across places and time. Legal experts can review credible audiovisual material when supporting victims. Communities can see their experiences recognised in a shared body of knowledge rather than isolated in private conversations.

For Copwatch, the project also marks an organisational leap. The organisation previously operated primarily through social media, but now it is reaching more than 70,000 mostly-young followers with videos, testimonies, open-source investigations, legal rights materials and campaigns in Greek and English. Film the Police moves the outlet toward a more robust media infrastructure: a guidebook, a workshop model, verification workflows, a public map and a secure submission process. IMS supported this transition by advising on platform design, user-friendliness and security, initially hosting the platform and later connecting Copwatch with safer hosting options for deployment.

When the Film the Police site and guide were announced, Copwatch did not have to “hunt” for participants. Communities, collectives and organisations invited the team in. Interview requests followed. People who had already been raising their phones at demonstrations now have somewhere to turn with their material. According to Chris Gioran, some are beginning to share older footage too, not only to expose misconduct, but also to regain a sense of agency after experiencing or witnessing violence.

Examples from the platform show how this works in practice. Published material includes footage from protests, reports of intimidation, allegations of obstruction when citizens recorded police activity and incidents where multiple perspectives help clarify the sequence of events.

Each publication is more than a video. It is contextualised, anonymised where necessary and connected to a broader map of incidents, making it possible to see where, when and how certain forms of policing recur.

This matters for journalism because it strengthens the supply of documentation. Mainstream reporting on police misconduct can be limited by lack of access, official framing or the absence of verifiable material. Film the Police creates a pathway from eyewitness recording to public-interest reporting. It helps ensure that affected people are not only sources of raw footage, but participants in a citizen journalism process that values accuracy, safety and context.

For a small organisation with a core team of three and a wider network of journalists, lawyers, designers, researchers, workshop facilitators, videographers and volunteers, that is a significant achievement. With support from foundations and citizens rather than state or corporate funding, Copwatch has built a model that connects media freedom, civic participation, legal empowerment and community safety.

The project’s broader lesson is clear: impact is not always immediate or easily counted. Sometimes it is the slow building of a method, an archive and a community that knows how to document its own reality. In Greece, where many people have already learned to raise their phones when power is abused, Film the Police helps turn that instinct into evidence, solidarity and accountability. Their next step is to translate the guidelines into possibly Urdu or other relevant languages and to conduct more workshops.

We’ve asked newsrooms to highlight any change or achievements resulting from interventions, activities or news articles that have been part of the PM4D programme.

Why do we not just report on how many media outlets we supported, how many received a training in AI and in advertising?When impact is documented, shared and celebrated, journalism becomes easier to fund, easier to defend and harder to ignore.

Read more impact stories: 

• There is value in stories of overlooked people
• Bridging journalism and technology to strengthen local media
• Made in Perpignan

The Media Pluralism Fund is operated by Journalismfund Europe and the Capacity Building and Mentorship is run by IMS (International Media Support). This project is co-funded by the European Commission and the King Baudouin Foundation.