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

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

This panel presents research from the “Visions of Policing” project investigating how the visibility of policing has been reconfigured in recent years - along with the contours and boundaries between public and institutional spaces themselves - by technological advance.

Representing work in Germany, France, and the UK, the panel offers a critical advancement of Goldsmith’s well known “New Visibilities” paper by investigating just how video materials feature in competing understandings of the publicness of police practice. The papers are connected by a fundamental question: what is it to say that policing is visible and thus ‘publicly available’?

The panel describes the role of video materials in this new visibility, how they “speak for themselves” but are also “spoken for” in specific contexts and through specific practices (Lynch, 2020). Drawing from and developing the insights of social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, interactionism, and ‘vernacular video’ (Tuma, 2019), the papers trace the accomplishment of visual ‘evidence’ across different domains of police practice; from the video-enabled public scrutiny of interrogations, through the use of body worn video and its affordances, to citizen journalism, and police responses to visually-available incidents. The panel thus advances understandings of the ‘new visibilities’ of policing from a recognition of their socio-technical availability - that is, that policing is rendered different visible via the ubiquity of smartphone telephony - to developing an understanding of the praxeological grounds of the accomplishment of visual order, interpretation, and accountability.

In sum, the panel investigates the ways in which an attention to public and institutional, professional and lay, “ways of seeing” might enable a democratisation of understandings of public policing beyond the control of the facticity of its own protected domain.

Subtopic

• Topic 6: Perceptions of Crime and Justice / Political and Social Discourses about Crime and Justice (Crime, Science and Politics WG)

Chair

• Laura Keesman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Individual Presentations

• The New Publicness of Interrogation: How Police Questioning is Changing Through Mediatization - Mina Godarzani Bakhtiari, TU Berlin; Rene Tuma, TU Berlin

• Police bodycams in Germany between new visibility and reproduction of the police gaze - Jasper Janssen, Bielefeld University; Simon Egbert, Bielefeld University

• Policing on Camera and the Court of Public Opinion Professional accounts and the the production and protecting of policing as a domain of practice - Terry SH Au-Yeung, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University; Robin James Smith, Cardiff University