Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

Abstract

Police organisations across much of the Western world have eagerly embraced body-worn video camera technology, seen as a way to enhance public trust in police, provide transparency in policing activity, reduce conflict between police and citizens and provide a police perspective of incidents and events. Indeed, the cameras have become an everyday piece of police ‘kit’. Despite the growing ubiquity of the body-worn video camera, understandings of the nature and value of the audiovisual footage produced by police remain inchoate. Given body-worn video camera’s promise of veracity, this article is interested in the aesthetics of the camera images and the socio-cultural construction of the cameras as tellers of truth. We treat body-worn video cameras as image-making devices linked to techniques and technologies of power, which construct and frame police encounters in specific ways, and we suggest that the aesthetics and point-of-view nature of the image contribute greatly to the truth-value that the images acquire. This article begins by providing an historical context for the use of cameras and images in policing. We then introduce our framework of visual criminology and present theories of point-of-view as a construct in the diverse areas of gaming, pornography and the visual arts, as well as in television and cinema. The article deploys the cinematic use of point-of-view to unpack the affective impact and aesthetic of the police body-worn video camera footage. We suggest that viewers of the footage are placed in the position of the corporeally absent police officer whose experience has been recorded by a viewfinderless device. This generates a vacillating interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, given that the alleged faithful recording of the event by the body-worn video camera presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event.

More than a trivial pursuit: Public order policing narratives and the ‘social media test’

“…Technological evolutions episodically increase scrutiny of policing, but this ‘new visibility’ (Goldsmith, 2010) through bystander video and social media can only go so far given police respond with their own forms of adapted and or improved surveillance (Lovell, 2003). In this context, the ‘war on cameras’ resulting from increased sousveillance of police (Wall and Linnemann, 2014), and subsequent police investment in a range of counter surveillance tactics (Wall and Linnemann, 2014) – notably Body Worn Cameras (McKay and Lee, 2019; Schneider, 2018). However, these technologies bring with them the problems of police discretion with very little oversight, manifested in the police ability to turn off Body Worn Cameras with impunity (Taylor, 2016).…”

La tecnología al servicio de la vigilancia y de la defensa de la vida

“…Eso ha ocurrido con el empleo de cámaras, instaladas en drones y robots, así como en los uniformes de los policías. La cámara usada en el cuerpo (en inglés, BWC, por las iniciales de Body-Worn Camera), un dispositivo de grabación de audio y video, ha sido cada vez más adoptada por las autoridades policiales en todo el mundo (McKay & Lee, 2020;Miranda, 2021). Se trata de un incremento natural de las cámaras utilizadas por los patrulleros para investigación y almacenamiento de pruebas grabadas (Bloch, 2021).…”

Body-worn cameras: An effective or cosmetic policing response to domestic and family violence?

“…Since filmmaking is always dependent upon choices (of movement, dialogue, lighting, music and so on), every scene -every image -could have been composed through different camera angles, dialogue, filters, movements and so on. (p. 8) Uniquely, in the context of BWC, the camera angle is dictated by police members and only shows their point of view (McKay and Lee, 2020). Therefore, the story told by BWC footage is a narrow one; 'the alleged faithful recording of the event by the BWC presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event' (McKay and Lee, 2020: 444).…”