Solving Crime: Crowd-sourced Investigations, New Media Convergences, Old Omissions

• In Event: Visualizing Crime, Policing and Evidence

Abstract

This paper traces the modern evolution of crowd-sourced investigations in a US-based new media context as a generation of amateur sleuths takes shape with profound effects upon contemporary understandings and explanations of crime. Historically associated with police requests for assistance (suspect notifications, emergency alerts), new and varied forms of collective investigation intersect across classroom-driven exonerations and innocence projects, mystery solving preoccupations of Reddit and social media forums, and the rise of true crime podcasts/documentary and the commentary spin-offs they inspire. While often offering insights into the daily workings of injustice in nuanced and visually sophisticated ways, these efforts uphold an emphasis upon the individualized rights-bearing neoliberal subject, as opposed to the social forces that produce harm and criminality. In all of this, visual epistemologies of crime and criminality proliferate but only against methodological assumptions about the proper role of atomized vetting, corroborating, and cross-referencing. The hermeneutics of crime – the deep attraction to its interpretation and exigesis – are configured in a manner so as to subsume other frames, questions, and modes of social analysis about harm, violence, and race, begging the question of how the structural might ever be framed as a compelling mystery to be solved.

Author

• Michelle Brown, University of Tennessee