Abstract
As a freelance reporter in 1992 covering police preparation for street riots in Ann Arbor during the NCAA basketball championship, I remember the officer in charge briefing his forces to remember that they could be videotaped at any time, and to behave accordingly. “Remember Rodney King,” he told them, referring to the internationally publicized evidence of police brutality that, at the time, was only a year old. It was an interesting moment—an instance of what Ming Kuok Lim has described as “inverted-panopticism”: the police were having to behave not only as if they might be watched at any time but, perhaps more importantly, as if their activities could be recorded (for broadcast) at any time.1 Long accustomed to having the last word in “our-word-against-theirs” exchanges about police behavior, the example of Rodney King demonstrated the power of the amateur video in holding authorities publicly and (potentially) legally accountable for their behavior.
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Notes
Ming Kuok Lim, “Inverted-Panopticism: The Use of Mobile Technologies in Surveillance” (paper, International Communication Association meeting, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007), accessed July 10, 2009, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p172572_index.html.
The founding date of Berkeley Copwatch is taken from the group’s Copwatch Handbook: An Introduction to Citizen Monitoring of the Police (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Copwatch, n.d.), accessed August 2, 2009, http://www.berkeleycopwatch.org/resources/Handbook_06.pdf.
Laura Huey, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle include a list of cities with Copwatch groups: “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside,” in Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life, ed. Torin Monahan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 149.
John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001), 708.
Stephen Green, “A Plague on the Pantopticon: Surveillance and Power in the Global Information Economy,” Information, Communication & Society 2, no. 1 (1999), 29.
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Colin Moynihan, “To Get ‘04 Tapes, City Cites Lost Evidence,” The New York Times, July 26, 2008, accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/nyregion/26video.html.
Jim Dwyer, “When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology,” The New York Times, July 30, 2008, accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/nyregion/30about.html.
Dwyer, “Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest,” The New York Times, July 30, 2008, accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html.
Mary Turck, “Homeland Insecurity in the Twin Cities,” The Twin Cities Daily Planet, August 26, 2008, accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2008/08/26/homeland-insecurity-twin-cities.html.
Liliana Seguro, “RNC Raids Have Been Targeting Video Activists,” AlterNet.org, September 1, 2008, accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.alternet.org/rights/97110/rnc_raids_have_been_targeting_video_activists_.
Diane Cardwell, “After Protests, City Agrees to Rewrite Proposed Rules on Photography Permits,” The New York Times, August 4, 2007, accessed August 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/nyregion/04filmmakers.html.
Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 226.
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Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), 25.
Thomas Mathiesen, “The Viewer Society,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997), 215.
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© 2011 Sue Curry Jansen, Jefferson Pooley, and Lora Taub-Pervizpour
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Andrejevic, M. (2011). Watching Back. In: Jansen, S.C., Pooley, J., Taub-Pervizpour, L. (eds) Media and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119796_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119796_13
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