The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous Surveillance

Abstract

Media and surveillance scholars often comment on the purported empowering quality of transparency, which they expect participatory media to promote. From its Enlightenment origins, transparency is related to accountability and legitimacy: its increase is believed to promote these. It has earned a position as an unassailed, prime normative value in contemporary liberal and social democracies. Though still valued, transparency is undergoing change in an era of ubiquitous surveillance. Publics still anticipate governmental and corporate self-disclosure and for such entities to operate visibly; but increasingly, deliberate and incidental surveillance by a range of sources, both institutional and informal, documents the activities of such authorities. More often, civilians participate in producing or amplifying transparency. This article explores this new transparency through a study of U.S. police, focusing on the discourse of police accountability activists and cop watchers to describe how their work adapts traditional notions of transparency. Recognizing the resilience of the police institution despite the new visibility of its violence, the article challenges the presumption that increased transparency will promote institutional reform or crisis. It concludes with a critical comment on prominent expectations that promoting the visibility of police can protect publics and ensure police accountability. This conclusion has implications for other forms of the new transparency, including whistleblowing (e.g., Edward Snowden) and leaking (e.g., WikiLeaks).

Citizen Science: Probing the Virtues and Contexts of Participatory Research

“…Overdevest and colleagues (Overdevest, Orr, and Stepenuck 2004) Another analogy would be to the increasingly common practice of capturing police encounters on cell phone video, to serve as evidence of abusive or illegal uses of force (Brucato 2015).…”

Review of Barney, Coleman, Ross, Sterne, and Tembeck’s The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age

“…Writing about the intersection of media and politics in the Arab world, York contends that political mobilisations require sufficient impetus in terms of shared beliefs, and are not simply a matter of actionable information being made accessible to a public. This is a point that resonates with recent developments, for example when considering the dearth of public mobilisation in response to circulated imagery of police violence (Brucato 2015).…”

Big data and the New Transparency: Measuring and representing police killings

“…When transparency is lacking, legitimacy declines; in its absence, governments rely on coercion over consent. Without legitimacy, either democracy or governments fail (Brucato, 2015b).…”

“…The article explains how video cameras-components of surveillance systems or civilian smart phones-are producing new mediated visibility of policing, the result being exemplary of new developments in transparency (Brucato, 2015a;Brucato, 2015b). In this commentary, I apply my concept of the New Transparency to various efforts to collect, analyze, and report on police use of force.…”