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I’ve been studying surveillance rather intensively for the past four years, and policing for a little less time. But my close familiarity with the intersection of policing and surveillance goes back much further. I was becoming politically aware during the Rodney King events, a reception that was deeply conditioned by my prior witnessing and direct experiences with police violence. By the mid-90s, I was participating in Copwatch activities, mainly filming policing of demonstrations, marches, and other political events. For about a year at the turn of the century, I participated in weekly Copwatch “patrols,” when we drove around “high crime” neighborhoods with a police scanner and stopped to video record any police encounters with civilians.

Most recently, I’ve been researching the intersection of policing and surveillance. I’m paying careful attention to the intentional, politicized activity of documenting policing, or “copwatching.” But I’m also observing the newer and broader occurrence of incidental video documentation of police by civilians. Additionally, I’m researching the activity by political activists and other related actors who advocate for civilians to participate in this form of documentation. My initial research question was: “What explains the proliferation of video documentation of police violence?” This expanded to include the followup: “How can the increased visibility offered by widespread civilian video documentation coincide with the continued or expanded use of violence by police?”

The Rodney King events created a crisis for American policing. But why? For readers who were around for the public, activist, and/or academic discussions that exploded during the early- to mid-90s, you may remember some of the ubiquitous responses. This is one place where I begin my research. Because this was the first major political event in the United State that began with the incidental documentation of police violence, this alone is reason to pay careful attention to this as a genetic moment. But it is also important precisely because of the discourse that emerged in this time. One thing of which I was convinced early in my inquiry is that this discourse continues to saturate the popular, activist, and academic consciousness in all the obvious related matters: police, police brutality, racialization of social control, and so on. But it also saturates the way most intellectuals and theorists talk about citizen journalism, surveillance, media, and accountability of public officials. While commentary on Rodney King seemed to have exhausted itself nearly 20 years ago, the idea of this as a critical moment when incidental documentation of the police produced popular power persists. The remote witnessing, archivability, and recirculation of the video offered a kind of transparency that produced a new kind of accountability.

Fast-forward two decades and now there is a “Rodney King” every week. And now, many of these videos depict a young Black male being shot and killed by police. Yet, there seems to be a concomitant silence, especially relative to the national conversation, popular demonstrations, and social unrest that followed “the original Rodney King”. But let us remember the sequence of events of that time. When the video was first released, the police chief admitted wrong-doing and, by today’s standards, his punitive action against the officers was strong. There was a Federal investigation into the department to discover the extent of similar violence that evaded the incidental documentation by a civilian. Criminal charges were pressed, which set in motion the more significant events. It was the failure of a jury to find the officers culpable that led to the LA Riots and social unrest across the country. It was not the uncovering of the violence by a citizen journalist, but the realization that the courts failed to deliver justice that led to a second national conversation and millions of dollars in property destruction. In this originary moment, video failed to ensure justice, transparency failed to produce accountability.

As I said above, the Rodney King moment continues to saturate our thinking about the power of civilian monitoring of the powerful — or “sousveillance. (“Sur-veillance” means “over-sight”, where “sur-” means “over”; “sous-” means “under”, and so “sousveillance,” following Mann’s development of the term, is the watching of the powerful by the governed.) But our historical memory seems to fail most people in an important way: the Rodney King events show us very clearly that there is a link between transparency and accountability that ought not be presumed. Or, perhaps more strongly, it demonstrates for us that transparency itself ought not be presumed as a necessary effect of video documentation.

Why might our historical memory be so distorted? In today’s surveillance society, we routinely encounter successes in video documentation producing transparency, which in turn avails the processes of accountability. People who commit crimes while being recorded by cameras have objective evidence to be used against them in courts, which then hold them accountable with criminal charges and jail sentences. Surveillance works.

Before the emergence of the surveillance society, we had centuries of belief that the mechanical representation of observable phenomena produced the most reliable and objective evidence thereof. All of modern science is built on such documentation — and particularly through mechanical means — as an assurance of faith in sufficient methodological rigor and reproducibility. What’s more, the machine removed the subjective, cognitive, experiential workings of the original observer. The scientist as human witness was for centuries and is today much less credible than the mechanical witness. The camera’s earliest uses included the documentation of observed scientific data. The camera is a most privileged witness, and its privileged status is earned by virtue of its mechanical qualities that render it objective. Cameras work.

Why, then, are critics of police brutality and advocates for its victims so routinely frustrated when video documentation fails to produce the expected accountability of officers, departments, or the institution of policing?

Why, also, do we see so many new videos of police violence, particularly if the transparency these videos are said to provide is expected to offer protection against this violence in the first place? Isn’t the proliferation of these videos alone evidence of the limited capacity of visibility to produce popular power?

My research connects with many current themes in American and global politics. We are living in the era of the leak. Information is not secure. The surveillance society has not only invaded the privacy of the governed. It has also rendered the actions of the powerful as information, archivable and amenable to circulation. No security measures seem sufficient to maintain the opacity of official secrets. Those with institutional power, despite their best efforts, are often behaving transparently, visible to the governed — thanks to Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and perhaps hundreds of lesser-known individuals. The dominant political thought from the ancient period to today’s post-modern world presumes that when the actions of the governing are visible to the governed, the latter is empowered in some way. The excitement that follows the newest leak is surely encouraged by the presumption that the exposure of the powerful to the world is certain to bring with it some accountability. But we need to question of what quality is this kind of transparency? What happens following this exposure? What kinds of accountability is enabled by these methods of documentation? Most importantly, the causal links between these leaks and their political outcomes need to be made clear in order to establish the political efficacy of documentation, circulation, and action based on (or limited to) these.

There’s much more to the story than what I’ve emphasized here with the added attention to the them of transparency. Recently, my thoughts have been focused in this area in order to collect and analyze the discourses of transparency in my ethnographic data, in thematically related public texts, in theoretical works, and elsewhere. That the theme of transparency is most often (almost exclusively) referenced as a sub-theme related to accountability is itself a profound statement. Transparency is undertheorized, and its political efficacy poorly established with close engagement of empirical data. I hope to contribute to improving this situation.

One Response to “The Visibility of Police Violence as Transparency”

  1. Geordie

    I am not sure your second question accurately strikes at what is or has been happening in terms of police violence. In short, you ask how surveillance has intersected with “increased” police violence… but I am not sure there is more police brutality and violence or if the ability to quickly pull out a cellphone and record these events makes it appear as if more violence occurs.

    I remember being regularly assaulted in Albany, NY gay bars in the 80s. We could not file a complaint anywhere, we had no blogs or real advocates for us in the community, no social media – and most importantly, it was our word against the cops. Now, with a cellphone, what cop is going to bust me in the head and call me a fag if s/he knows there is a crowd that might be filming the event? It does still happen, and it is being documented, but generally only in two conditions: the cop(s) think no one else is around, or watching, or filming; OR the cop(s) lose temper and the violence is explosive. In the latter scenario, the act of brutality tends to take less time, in my experience, and in the former the police will take a lot of time just beating someone ala Rodney King.

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