What do George Zimmerman, D.A.R.E. drug prevention programs, and TV personality John Walsh have in common? In his book Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America's Surveillance Society, Joshua Reeves argues that they are all examples of the extraordinarily widespread, powerful, and sometimes misguided effort to use ordinary citizens in policing and social control efforts. The central problematic of the book is a theoretical and historical focus on lateral surveillance, framed around the post-9/11 slogan, "If you see something, say something." Citizen Spies is an extraordinarily wide-ranging look at how "American citizens have been imagined and deployed as crucial-yet unpredictable and potentially dangerousresources for policing the American experiment" (p. 3). This thesis is explored through substantive chapters on police crowdsourcing, 911 emergency response, neighborhood watch organizations, drug policing in schools, and terrorism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.