Dumpster Data: An Investigation of Crime Scene Photographs on Guam

• In Event: NARRCRIM Panel 2 Narrative Criminology

Abstract

While conducting ethnographic research on police training methods on Guam, a retired Chief of Police gifted me a box of crime scene photographs featuring crimes from the 1950s-70s. He claimed to have found two sets of photographs in a dumpster outside the station on his last day at work. The photographs include images of automobile collisions, drug busts, suicides, and homicides. Some of the photographs are marked for weapons and shells. Doubtless used in police investigations, some were probably used in police training. The photographs include scenes of probable child abuse, burglary, police Interrogation, and illegal gambling. Initially explored through interviews with local law enforcement and US military police personnel based on Guam, next I examined the photographs with theoretical lenses derived from criminology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and visual anthropology. The main methodological procedure adopted is from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, to locate the ‘punctum’, a point in the image that piques attention. These photographs are ‘dirty data' emerging from a police dumpster that tell the story of the imposition of colonial (dis)order in America’s coastal backyard, on Guam, the largest military base in the Pacific, and the “tip of the spear” of US colonial hegemony.

Author

• Douglas Stephen Farrer, University of Exeter