Policing on Camera and the Court of Public Opinion Professional accounts and the the production and protecting of policing as a domain of practice

• In Event: Visions of Policing: Accomplishing the Public Availability of Policing and the Uses and Interpretations of Video materials

Abstract

Advances in visual communicative technologies have seen policing practices becoming increasingly visible to expanding and distal audiences. In this paper, we examine instances of police practice viewed as controversial and subjected to scrutiny by members of the public on social media. Drawing on three cases - one of police violence, one of a contestable arrest for fare evasion, and one involving a high-speed police chase which led to fatalities - we describe how the ‘professional vision’ of policing is produced in accounts which provide for particular ways of viewing the events from the ‘police perspective’. As such, the cases described produce the events as understandable within the ‘domain’ of professional policing. In a manner distinct from other examples of ‘professional vision,’ in which a ‘version of events’ is contrasted to ‘lay vision’ of the public, our cases also feature practices which assemble a ‘technically-accurate category-neutral’ (Smith, Forthcoming) description of the event which acts to defer the ‘police vision’ whilst also utilising linguistic technologies related to policing expertise. In this sense, the public viewing of the event and relevant categorial and moral resources are bracketed out of the scene. In this sense, the ‘domain’ of policing is not only produced but protected - through ‘technogoguery’ (Lynch, 2020) - against the ‘vulgar viewing’: that is, what everyone can plainly see happened is not as ‘inaccurate’ as much ‘irrelevant’. We argue that analysing such professional accounts is significant in highlighting what we might call the politics of description which form a significant obstacle in the democratisation of the public accountability of public policing.

Authors

• Terry SH Au-Yeung, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

• Robin James Smith, Cardiff University