working rules!
so, i’m at work. and despite the title of this post and our reading of this week, working does not, in fact, rule. but i’m reading this article and i’m going to jot down some comments informally whilst i do so. this blog will be my pharmakon.
one interesting aspect of CCTV surveillance, for example, is that by virtue of the camera’s position – high up, generally – and the operator’s perspective, even relatively innocuous-seeming acts, like wearing some sort of headgear or a hood, become disproportionately suspicious. a co-present observer would not generally be hindered in recognizing a person’s face by a baseball cap or even a hooded sweater; to the deaf CCTV observer hanging from the ceiling, however, it becomes an intrinsically suspicious effort to conceal one’s identity.
the CCTV operators also seem to exhibit almost a bizarre, voyeuristic satisfaction in observing youths. admittedly, “10-12 year old boys” and groups of black teenagers might be known to commit the occasional petty crime, but they don’t seem to warrant the kind of intense surveillance described in this piece. i suppose, in effect, this has something to do with the relatively mundane nature of the events being watched: petty crime is about all that an observer will see, in most cases. and yet it seems like youths almost certainly don’t commit crime in any organized way without the involvement of some much older individuals, and that it would ideally be these individuals who were getting targeted with surveillance.
this is part of a broader problem with policing, especially in contemporary society. the most publicly visible forms of crime are largely the province of poor minority youths without a whole lot of choice in the matter, committing relatively petty crimes (petty crimes, which in certain states, can land one’s ass in prison for life). the kinds of serious crimes which are committed by rich, reclusive people of assorted ethnicities – gun-running, large-scale drug trafficking, white-collar crime, etc. etc. etc. – generally occur well out of the public eye, in places where there are almost definitely no CCTV cameras or police beats.
page 126: “the operator is keen to keep an eye on them and follows the bus two stops.” OK, hold on. follows the bus two stops? how many cameras does this “operator” have!? how are they all connected? i am getting really disturbed at this point. it seems from this, and from later sections in which the piece describes the operational activities of the surveillance centre, that this operation in the UK is considerably more coherent and organized entity than anything i’m personally familiar with over here. they are able to track people for extended distances
and so, regarding my comments about there being probably more important things to worry about than 10-year olds, consider the anecdote on page 127-28, in which what sounds essentially like a pimp giving a prostitute a smack, is laughed off by camera operators. this is from the people who were eager enough to spot some crime that they were analyzing high-fives for drug exchanges and watching kids on the bus ride it for two whole blocks. they see a bona-fide instance of some criminal activity, and just because it happens to be ‘a domestic incident’, it doesn’t get reported.
with a level of academic neutrality and understatement that seems almost facetious, the author of the piece remarks, “there is no simple correspondence between the discovery of criminal activity and resulting deployment and arrest.” in other words, the police are only sent respond to crimes when some idiots who’ve been watching TV for hours fucking feel like it! that’s really reassuring. as a youth who happens to be wearing a hooded sweatshirt, one can look forward to only the most intense scrutiny beneath countless cameras, whilst as a woman getting smacked around by some guy, one has the benefit of the derisive laughter of some morons surrounded my monitors blocks away. more generally, i wonder what the actual qualifications of the people watching these monitors are? one aspect of the ’surveillant assemblage’ and its de-centred-ness seems to be that the people doing the watching are the exact opposite of the sort of people one would actually like to be keeping an eye on things.
one final thing i noticed throughout the article was this tendency against ‘loitering,’ also known in the vernacular as ‘just being in a place,’ and which is in fact a fairly common thing. the author notes that “the concept of Otherness is intimately bound up with views as to the appropriate use of social space and who has a right to do what in the city centre” (141). interestingly enough, it seems like the basic ‘appropriate use’ of social space, according to these observers, is consumption! it’s no coincidence that the observers spend most of their day watching people at the behest of store detectives. the most commonly-cited ’suspicious behaviour’ in the piece was simply ‘being in’ a place, without any apparent intent to purchase or consume. this really makes me question the whole idea of ’social space.’ after all, if the observers of a given ’space’ mark you out as ’suspicious’ when you’re socialising with your friends, and ‘normal’ when you’re purchasing products, doesn’t that make it a purchasing space, rather than a social space?
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