‘If you see something, say something’. Pre-crime and the Suspected Other

• In Event: Pre-Crime: Preempting Suspects at the Temporal Border

Abstract

In May 2013 graphic media images of the attack on serving soldier Lee Rigby, Chiswick, London, were there for all to see. This event occurred not long after the explosion of a bomb near to the finishing line of the Boston marathon on April 15th 2013 killing three and injured over two hundred and fifty people. Both flag the importance of post-hoc eye-witness accounts for any investigative process and underlie the drive to actively involve the public in the management of terrorism - as echoed in the Department of Homeland Security’s adage quoted above; a directive not dissimilar to the UK Government’s calls for public vigilance found in their ‘Preparing for Emergencies’ document (see Mythen and Walklate, 2006). These events, in different ways, point to deeper structural issues at play in ‘seeing and saying’. Drawing on Walklate and Mythen (2014) and recent empirical data, we wish to consider three elements to this process: creating the suspected, targeting the suspected and making sense of the suspected. In conclusion we shall reflect upon the challenges posed by these for the ‘suspected’ themselves and the compromises to justice implied for those societies following this route in seeking security.

Authors

• Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool

• Gabe Mythen, University Liverpool