Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras”

Abstract

This paper considers how the politics of security and order are also a politics of aesthetics encompassing practical struggles over the authority and regulation of ways of looking and knowing. To do this, the paper considers the visual economies of police power in the United States by engaging what has been called the "war on cameras", or the police crackdown on citizen photographers who "shoot back" or "stare down" police. Despite US law generally endorsing the right for citizens to film or photograph on-duty public police officers, in recent years hundreds of cases have been documented where police have confiscated or smashed cameras, deleted film, or intimidated and threatened those wielding an unauthorized camera. For us, this crackdown on the unauthorized stare is a theoretically and politically insightful case study-a diagnostic moment-for engaging more openly and starkly the assumptions underpinning police power more generally, particularly the ways police power aims to actively fabricate social order by eradicating anything it deems a threat in the name of security. Ultimately, we argue that the violence holstered, literally and figuratively, on the hip of modern policing is inseparable from an attendant politics of staring and visuality that further extends and perpetuates state power's aim of pacification.

Policing on camera

“…This has included confiscating or breaking cameras, trying to bluff or intimidate bystanders to get them to stop recording, or pressuring citizens to surrender their cameras (Potere, 2012;Wall and Linnemann, 2014). Some officers at public protests, and wearing opaque face shields, remove their nametags and place black tape over their badge numbers to ensure they cannot be personally identified on film.…”

“…Recent work on the relationship between police officers and citizens with cellphone cameras tends to portray police and cameras as being in an inevitably conflictual relationship. Such research focuses on notable instances where officers have confiscated or even destroyed cameras (Wall and Linnemann, 2014). Accordingly, Stephanie Simon (2012) describes the post-9/11 security environment as involving a police coordinated "war on photography".…”

Camera-friendly Policing: How the Police Respond to Cameras and Photographers

“…Destruction: If they confiscate cameras, some police will also delete any footage that was previously recorded and/or destroy cameras (Wall and Linnemann 2014). A recent example saw a South Florida police officer confiscating a camera and then deleting footage recorded by Juan Santana, who had recorded an Officer Sentamanat aggressively stopping-and-frisking an 18-year-old male.…”

“…Though the legality of such confiscation is questionable, police officers sometimes claim that it is acceptable if police believe that some footage will be a vital piece of evidence in the investigation of a criminal offence. If photographers refuse, police officers have been known to seize cameras from photographers (Wall and Linnemann 2014). Crucially, the confiscation of cameras also means that police officers can prevent footage about a given incident from being accessed by the public.…”

“…Sociologists speculate that the surveillance of police is producing an "image management crisis" as police organizations are forced to try to explain away videos exposing malpractice (Haggerty and Sandhu 2014). Some academics speculate that, given the emerging image management crisis, police officers may respond to cameras and photographers by waging a "war on cameras" by confiscating cameras, destroying footage, and arresting photographers (Wilson and Serisier 2010;Simon 2012;Wall and Linnemann 2014). Because of a lack of empirical evidence, little is known about which, if any, of these theories best describes the way that the police understand and respond to cameras and photographers.…”