Cops, cameras, and the policing of ethics
| Author | Meg Stalcup,Charles Hahn |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659814 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
659814TCR0010.1177/1362480616659814Stalcup and HahnStalcup and Hahn
research-article2016
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2016, Vol. 20(4) 482 –501
Cops, cameras, and the
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616659814
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Meg Stalcup
University of Ottawa, Canada
Charles Hahn
University of Washington, USA
Abstract
In this article, we explore how cameras are used in policing in the United States. We
outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social
media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is
now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, we
identify and examine intersections between video footage and police subjectivity in case
studies of recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law Enforcement Academy and
the Seattle Police Department’s body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases
in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of
cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions.
Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for
field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities.
Keywords
Body cameras, ethics, new media, surveillance, training
Introduction
“What are you doing? Get off of me!” yells a girl. An officer is struggling to secure her
hands. Another teenager thrusts herself between the scuffling pair, sweeping her friend to
Corresponding author:
Meg Stalcup, École d’études sociologiques et anthropologiques, 120, Université, Pavillon des sciences
sociales, pièce 10008, Ottawa ON K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: mstalcup@uOttawa.ca
Stalcup and Hahn
483
the side to face the officer. He seizes the wrist of the new teen with one hand, and with
the other, punches her in the face. Then he has her turned around, body up against the
patrol car and one arm behind her back.
The physical sequence took less than 10 seconds, but the altercation had begun min-
utes before and someone passing by had begun recording with a cell phone. The video
shows the black teens’ defiance, and the white officer’s decisive punch, set to the sound
of the videographer’s exclamations. In the gathering crowd, other cell phones are being
held up. In short order, the footage was uploaded to the video-sharing platform YouTube
and spread rapidly. That evening, it aired on local news programs in Seattle, Washington,
where the incident had taken place, as well as around the United States.1
The teen, stepping in to separate the armed officer from her friend, had pushed him
forcefully. Given her physicality and near access to his gun, officers in the Seattle Police
Department (SPD) were adamant that the punch had been a professional and appropriate
response. Subsequently, the teenager offered the officer a personal apology at a meeting
arranged by a local civil rights leader “to calm down a growing volatile situation”, and
was charged in juvenile court with fourth-degree assault (unwanted physical contact that
does not result in an injury) (KOMO, 2010). She pled guilty, and received probation and
one year of community service. The police department reviewed the officer’s actions,
and absolved him of excessive use of force.
At that point, the relationship between the Seattle Police and the public was already
strained, frequently along color lines. There had been several use-of-force cases that
year, captured on patrol car dash-cams, security cameras, or bystander cell phones, which
had shocked viewers. In one, members of a gang unit responding to reports of a robbery
by Latino males were revealed kicking at a man’s head and stomping several times on his
leg, as he (accurately) protested his innocence. In another incident, the most important, a
man crossed a downtown street in front of a patrol car, carrying a small knife and a block
of wood. The officer stopped and left his car, walking through the dash-cam’s field of
view, yelling to put the knife down. No response is heard, seconds pass, and fatal shots
ring out.
The victim was John T Williams, a Native American woodcarver, who was deaf. The
afternoon killing, only partially captured by the camera in the patrol car but entirely by
the audio recording, reverberated through local television, social media, and the signifi-
cant network of First Nations (Renville, 2011), adding weight to calls for police reform.
In this article, we explore how cameras and their footage are being used in policing in
the context of these events, and similar ones around the United States. We outline the
trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and the use of social
media together generate an ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now
routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault (1985, 1997),
we identify and examine intersections between these videos and police subjectivity in two
case studies. First, we look at the use of violent video footage in recruit training at
Washington state’s Basic Law Enforcement Academy, just outside Seattle. Second, we
return to events in the city, and detail how they led to a body camera program, focusing on
the Seattle Police Department’s efforts to manage the video footage on new media plat-
forms such as YouTube. We analyze these cases in relation to major arguments for and
against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as essentially
484
Theoretical Criminology 20(4)
techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John
Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-
production of socio-techno subjectivities.
Cycles of crisis
Beyond the city limits of Seattle, videos circulated of other killings, increasing in density
on a timeline of public attention until there were no spaces between the individual trag-
edies. In retrospect, the shooting of Oscar Grant by a California Bay Area transit officer
in 2009, Eric Garner’s last breath on a sidewalk after being put in a chokehold by a New
York police officer in 2014, and the death of Michael Brown, killed by a Ferguson,
Missouri police officer a few months later, are brackets on a phase of change. By 2015,
video deaths came too thick and heavy for each alone to capture the same degree of
mainstream attention, although sites for acknowledging and tallying them had prolifer-
ated. One significant maker and marker of this shift was the Black Lives Matter (BLM)
movement, founded around the midpoint of the period by three black women in reaction
to the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer in
Florida in 2012, and his acquittal in 2013. #BlackLivesMatter intended, in the words of
one of its founders, Alicia Garza (2014), to be “an ideological and political intervention
in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise”,
and rapidly developed into the decentralized, nonhierarchical chapters of the BLM
National Network. Counting and naming the women, men, and children who died, dis-
proportionately of color, they signified the loss of individuals through their relation to
shared systemic violence and oppression.
Nothing indicates that fatal encounters between the police and members of the public
actually increased in the years leading up the deluge of video deaths. Because reporting
such encounters to the federal government is not mandatory for law enforcement, and
public health statistics are flawed (Klinger, 2012), there is perhaps no way to be com-
pletely sure, but fatal attacks on officers, which are kept by the National Law Enforcement
Officers Memorial Fund (2014), showed no upswing. If anything, despite highs and
lows, the decade average of 163 officer deaths per year, between 2004 and 2014, gradu-
ally declined. Official Department of Justice statistics on justifiable police homicides
(committed by officers)—collected in an FBI database for self-reports by law enforce-
ment—suggested about 400 deaths per year, but from only around 750 agencies (out of
nearly 18,000). The yearly variations were useless for assessing rising or falling rates,
since they could simply be more or fewer agencies submitting their numbers. The same
problem arose with data on “death by legal intervention” in the National Vital Statistics
System, in which underreporting as high as 51 percent made it impossible to assess if
changes were in mortality or in reporting (Klinger, 2012: 80). In another marker of this
period, however, several nongovernmental efforts to track police killings were started.
Relying to varying degrees on newspaper articles and government records, paid research-
ers and crowdsourcing, the sites “Fatal Encounters”, “Killed by the Police”, and the
“Gun Violence Archive” all began in 2013, and another, Mapping Police Violence, in
2014. These nongovernmental sites documented, retrospectively and in actuality, closer
to 1000–1200 police homicides per year.
Stalcup and Hahn
485
Thus the number of fatal encounters seemed relatively steady, although ultimately
unknown. What had plainly escalated, however, was the quantity of violent images and
their circulation, both online through the new activist groups, and in the mainstream
media. The sources were usually...
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