The showability of policing: How police officers’ use of videos in organizational contexts reproduces police culture
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14773708221144826 |
| Author | Laura D. Keesman |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The showability of policing:
How police officers’use of
videos in organizational
contexts reproduces police
culture
Laura D. Keesman
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
While much scholarly literature on police ‘canteen’culture focuses on police storytelling, there is
little research on the effects of camera phone technologies on police behaviours, particularly in
organizational settings. This article introduces the concept of showability to examine how police
officers use videos in their everyday police life, and how this relates to police culture. Based on an
ethnographic study of the Dutch police, it illustrates that officers show, share, and discuss videos
of various policing acts such as arrests, car chases, and use-of-force events, and do this in various
locations such as office spaces, squad cars, and on the streets. First and foremost, officers show
videos to entertain and to educate themselves and their fellow officers. Second, showing videos is
a new occupational practice that, like in telling stories, reinforces and refutes aspects of police cul-
ture, for instance, a masculine ethos. The article contributes to criminological scholarship on the
era of ‘new visibility’by demonstrating that showability is a form of inward visibility wherein offi-
cers generate a visual world that fits their professional vision. It also contributes to a sociological
understanding of the ‘everydayness’of police culture. I claim that showability is a key feature of
policing practices, which is relevant in light of increasing pressures on the police to account for
their work.
Keywords
New visibility, police accountability, police culture, policing, showability, visual criminology
Corresponding author:
Laura D. Keesman, Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Roeterseiland Campus, Nieuwe
Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: l.keesman@uva.nl; l.d.keesman@rug.nl
Article
European Journal of Criminology
2023, Vol. 20(3) 905–924
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14773708221144826
journals.sagepub.com/home/euc
Introduction
In recent years, policing has transformed from a low-visibility occupation to a high-
visibility one (Loftus, 2019). Due to the omnipresence of smartphones, the police
(mainly uniformed) is regularly captured on film. Police officers now work in continuous
techno-social contexts not only by being filmed (Bock, 2016), but also by filming civi-
lians through body-worn cameras (BWCs) and closed-circuit television (CCTV). The
growing presence of cameras, and the capacity to share videos on online platforms
such as YouTube and social media sites like Facebook, has given rise to intensified scru-
tiny of police acts, especially of police misconduct (Goldsmith, 2010; Lum, 2021). Public
(media) visibility in particular has increased the attention towards ‘just’policing and
sparked discussions about police accountability (Bekkers and Moody, 2014; Lister and
Rowe, 2015; Walker and Archbold, 2019). Existing scholarship on visibility generally
focuses on officers being filmed (Miller, 2016) and scholarly literature on police
culture often departs from a narrative lens (Smith et al., 2014). Less, however, is
known about how police officers themselves use videos to make sense of and account
for their actions. In this article, I offer an empirical account of how videos play a role
within police teams.
Building on studies on the tellability of policing (Schaefer and Tewksbury, 2018; Van
Hulst, 2013), I explore by whom, to whom, when, where, and what kind of videos are
shown. I examine what videos are showable, in which organizational settings officers
show videos to one another, why they show them, and how this relates to extant insights
on police culture. Empirically, I fill the gap between narrative and police visibility studies
by showing that videos, like the telling of ‘war stories’(Van Maanen, 1973a), perform a
social and educational function. That is, officers use them to entertain as well as educate
themselves and each other. The theoretical contribution is to shift the focus from police
officers as objects of surveillance to how they appropriate video showing and sharing in
occupational contexts, which allows us to see how videos are used in the (re)creation of
occupational police culture. To denote this shift, I introduce the concept of showability.
In terms of methods, the article illustrates that research into officers’use of videos neces-
sitates longer-term ethnographic engagement; building rapport is indispensable to recog-
nize and grasp the salience of informal practices around video showing and sharing.
Finally, by illustrating under what conditions the showing of videos occurs, the article
contributes to the tradition of research into police culture and to criminological scholar-
ship on the era of ‘new visibility’and visual criminology (Carrabine, 2015; Hayward,
2009). In sum, in this article, I clarify: (1) what kinds of videos are shown and why offi-
cers show them and (2) what the showing of videos tells us about the effects of visual
technologies on policing behaviours in organizational contexts, and the reproduction
or potential for transformations of police culture.
The ‘new visibility’and police culture
There is now an abundance of research indicating that the police have entered a new era
of (public) visibility (Sandhu and Haggerty, 2015). Brown (2016: 293–294) indicates this
has been generated by (1) the ubiquity of camera phones, (2) people’s awareness of their
906 European Journal of Criminology 20(3)
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