Racialization as a Way of Seeing: The Limits of Counter-Surveillance and Police Reform

Abstract

This paper considers the role of video footage in recent high-profile cases of anti-black police brutality in the United States. I illuminate the limits of the counter-surveillance impetus to film the police by contextualizing this strain of social media utopianism within the larger history of what I call "racialization as a way of seeing." Racialization as a way of seeing is a historical formation that brings together the history of policing, the development of visual epistemologies, and the history of the naturalization of the criminality of blackness. I then track how the optimism of the counter-surveillance discourse has been recuperated by the state into consent for police worn cameras-reforms which threaten to strengthen a system built on structural racism, rather than ameliorate its injustices. I conclude by suggesting an emergent model for how video evidence may be paradoxically working to relegitimize the police and the state in the newest era of "21 st century policing."

Tor and the City: MSA-level Correlates of Interest in Anonymous Web Browsing

“…The one exception to this pattern is that MSAs with higher percentage white population tend to have greater interest in Tor (as measured by search popularity), controlling for other factors. Communities of color have often been disproportionately targeted for state surveillance (Beutin 2017), but these findings offer some indication that anonymity-granting technologies may not be reaching the people who might most need such digital affordances.…”

Predictive Policing for Reform? Indeterminacy and Intervention in Big Data Policing

“…In the US and other colonial contexts, prevention has been intimately tied to violence and the racialization of enslaved bodies through the spectacle of state terror. The first town watch systems in the American colonies were organized in the seventeenth century to prevent slaves from running away or revolting (Beutin 2017;Williams 2015;Wood 2009). When the first professional municipal police forces were established, prevention was incorporated into founding charters (Dubber and Valverde 2006;De Lint 2000).…”

Database-Driven Empowering Surveillance: Definition and Assessment of Effectiveness

“…It stems from the 2010 issue of Surveillance & Society dedicated to "Surveillance and Empowerment," in which the editorial and one of its articles make explicit use of the "empowering surveillance" term (Monahan, Phillips, and Murakami Wood 2010;Shilton 2010). Other terms associated with this subfield are sousveillance (literally to watch from below; see Brucato 2015;Mann and Ferenbok 2013;Mann, Nolan, and Wellman 2003;Verde Garrido 2015), inverse surveillance (see Mann 2004;Timan and Oudshoorn 2012), defensive surveillance (Institute for Applied Autonomy 2006), and counter-surveillance (see Beutin 2017;Fiske 1998;Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006;Monahan 2006;Wilson and Serisier 2010).…”

“…This dates back to the 1991 Rodney King incident, which is considered by several scholars as a watershed moment that inspired many video-driven empowering surveillance operations (Goldsmith 2010;Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006;Institute for Applied Autonomy 2006;Mann, Nolan, and Wellman 2003;Wilson and Serisier 2010). Indeed, it is clear that empowering surveillance scholars mostly tend to follow in the tracks of activists and their initiatives, for instance, regarding cop-watching (see Beutin 2017;Haggerty 2012;Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006;Wilson and Serisier 2010) or anti-repression tactics in large protests (see Goldsmith 2010; Institute for Applied Autonomy 2006). This tendency to follow the activists and their initiatives is carried through in the present text, not only by determining which phenomenon to study but also by focusing on one of these activists' main dilemmas: whether or not their attempts are effective.…”