Capturing crime, criminals and the public’s imagination: Assembling Crime Stoppers and CCTV surveillance

Abstract

This article explores Crime Stoppers’ use of CCTV images as a node of a surveillant assemblage via analysis of a sample of Crime Stoppers advertisements deploying CCTV images supplemented by interviews and other qualitative procedures. Advertisements using images are becoming more prevalent and rely on complex textual narratives and the CCTV image format to construct crime for public consumption to generate ‘tips’. The advertisements capture a narrow range of ‘street crime’ to the benefit of private business and to the neglect of pervasive and serious conduct affecting the less powerful. The convergence of Crime Stoppers and CCTV surveillance is found to have unanticipated and ironic consequences regarding deterrence and identification, to befit a form of ‘counter-law’, and to demonstrate potential to harm individuals and visible minorities. Theoretical implications of this analysis for understanding assumptions about the relation between image and the Truth of crime, governance, and surveillance are discussed.

Regulación de la videovigilancia en México. Gestión de la ciudadanía y acceso a la ciudad

“…Esto dibuja una ciudadanía donde las determinantes jurídicas son desplazadas por valores sustentados en un difuso y cambiante marco moral (Lippert, 2009), lo cual, por supuesto, acelera los procesos de clasificación y categorización social, que pueden minar la capacidad de ejercicio de la ciudadanía formal, limitando sus capacidades para enfrentar las lógicas de estratificación y dominación moral que se imponen sobre los ciudadanos.…”

Urban Surveillance and the Struggle between Safe and Exciting Nightlife Districts

“…City governments cooperate with the police, but also with the licensed trade, private security, residents and visitors of nightlife districts who are all expected to take their responsibility for safe nightlife districts. Sometimes even the mass media is involved to persuade citizens to assist the police in solving crimes (Lippert and Wilkinson 2010). This 'responsibilisation strategy' is meant to result in an 'enhanced network of more or less informal crime control, complementing and extending the formal controls of the criminal justice state… The primary objective is to spread responsibility for crime control onto agencies, organisations and individuals that operate outside the criminal justice state and to persuade them to act appropriately' (Garland 2001: 124-5).…”

Attaching Hollywood to a Surveillant Assemblage: Normalizing Discourses of Video Surveillance

“…These discourses express and structure how we understand and act upon an increasingly watched world and the technologies comprising it. Recent work has begun to situate video surveillance in relation to surveillant assemblages (Lippert, 2009;Lippert & Wilkinson, 2010;Wilkinson & Lippert, 2012). One way of conceiving of normalization is as a decidedly overlooked element of these assemblages.…”

“…An emergent model of surveillance in surveillance studies is the assemblage (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000;Lippert, 2009;Lippert & Wilkinson, 2010;Wilkinson & Lippert, 2011;Murakami-Wood, 2013), a surveillance entity that involves merging previously distinct elements. Adapted from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), here surveillance is "rhizomatic", its growth occurs "across a series of interconnected roots which throw up shoots in different locations" rather than hierarchically (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 614).…”