deconstructing surveillance
I like this paragraph, from this week’s readings. It features that grand signal word – supplement! That’s my cue to pull out my worn old copy of de la grammatologie and give the text a wee deconstructive shakedown. Let’s see what falls out.
“CCTV catches criminals. It spots crimes, identifies lawbreakers and helps convict the guilty. The spread of this technology means that more town centres, shopping precincts, business centres and car parks around the country will become no-go areas for the criminal…. CCTV is a wonderful technological supplement to the police… One police officer in Liverpool likened the 20-camera system as having 20 officers on duty 20 hours a day, constantly taking notes.” (Clive Norris, 255)
What does it mean to say that CCTV is a supplement to the police? Language has the poor befuddled constabulary trapped. To supplement is always to supplant! In the most basic sense, if CCTV catches criminals, what role is left to the flesh-and-blood police officer? The once-romanticized detective becomes a mere felon-collector, a servant of an all-seeing eye rather than an autonomous investigator. The police regard the surveillant assemblage as a useful, but ultimately inessential tool added on to their already-complete investigative apparatus. The supplement always corresponds to a lack, however; the disciplinary institution that is the contemporary police department would be noticeably ‘incomplete’ without its ’supplement.’ 20 surveillance cameras are in fact quite different from 20 police officers ‘taking notes.’
Consider, for example, the archival information produced by these two different recorders. 20 surveillance cameras will produce a digitized, photorealistic, reproducible document for as long as they are left to record. Their catalogue of events will be regarded as objectively ‘reliable’ by all but the most paranoid and/or subjectivist among us. The data they produce can be stored, manipulated, cross-indexed, edited, and patched back together.
20 police officers watching the same scenes, by contrast, will produce conflicting accounts, perhaps tinged with bias, of a decidedly mixed quality, depending on their individual levels of hunger, fatigue, cynicism, and/or corruption. They will be likely to have missed some important things and noticed some insignificant ones. Even in the unlikely event they were to witness a crime take place, their accounts of the perpetrators’ appearances will often be unreliable, particularly if said perpetrators happen to be of a different race from said hypothetical police officer.
Of course, a human police officer is not all ‘bad;’ a camera, after all, can only deter crime to a certain extent, and can be fooled by the criminal in-the-know by any number of tricks-of-the-trade. A police officer in the flesh presents a much more imposing deterrent, and can often defuse conflicts before they begin – as Norris notes, the ‘restitution of order’ is a police officer’s main task in such situations, and this is almost invariably accomplished via face-to-face interaction (252).
But this increasing reliance by the police on CCTV implies some significant structural transformations in the role of the police officer. In a society policed by surveillance of this sort, the individual investigator’s role becomes increasingly involved with the manipulation of digital archive information. This is the ‘lifting out’ referred to by McCahill (in Norris, 253). By correlating the various tracks which individual subjects leave behind in digital space – credit card charges, web browsing patterns, purchased items, and of course, CCTV images – the police can reconstruct the suspect’s digital body from the distributed archive of the surveillant assemblage. Physical evidence is of course not ‘irrelevant,’ but many crimes in an electronic society are of such a nature that they traces they leave are exclusively digital.
Of course, the police are by no means uncritical celebrants of surveillance technology. This is perhaps similar to the paradox noted by Steve Mann (345) in his sousveillance experiments, when he noted that the institutions most likely to object to his filming on their premises were those with the most surveillance cameras of their own. The watchers, in effect, do not take kindly to being watched. Rodney King is really only the most immediately obvious example of this kind of sousveillance being targeted against the police. Police objections to the installations of cameras in their vehicles also illustrate the flexibility of their opinions regarding surveillance. Though I can’t find a citation at the moment, I recall the police officers’ associations in Canada made a reasonably-sized fuss about the issue of installing cameras in police cars to record police compliance with department protocols. Surveillance is acceptable when its gaze is directed on the Other, but unconscionable when one is subjected to it oneself.
Do I have a point with all of this? Does deconstruction ever have a point? Not in so few words. Essentially, I just wanted to think a little about the video camera and how its archive is a ’supplement’ to the police. These kinds of simple user/technology dichotomies characterize a lot of common thinking about surveillance technologies, often leading us to ignore how such technologies necessarily shape user behaviour in definite ways. The police don’t just ‘use’ CCTV, rather, the police – and disciplinary institutions in general – are in the process of being themselves transformed by CCTV’s ubiquity.
Works cited
Steve Mann, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”
Clive Norris, “From personal to digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the technological mediation of suspicion and social control”
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