Title: Evidentiary Video and " Professional Vision " in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, 2016
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Video Activism and the ambiguities of counter-surveillance
Surveillance & Society, 2010
This paper examines the use of visual technologies by political activists in protest situations to monitor police conduct. Using interview data with Australian video activists, this paper seeks to understand the motivations, techniques and outcomes of video activism, and its relationship to counter-surveillance and police accountability. Our data also indicated that there have been significant transformations in the organization and deployment of counter-surveillance methods since 2000, when there were large-scale protests against the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne accompanied by a coordinated campaign that sought to document police misconduct. The paper identifies and examines two inter-related aspects of this: the act of filming and the process of dissemination of this footage. It is noted that technological changes over the last decade have led to a proliferation of visual recording technologies, particularly mobile phone cameras, which have stimulated a corresponding proliferation of images. Analogous innovations in internet communications have stimulated a coterminous proliferation of potential outlets for images Video footage provides activists with a valuable tool for safety and publicity. Nevertheless, we argue, video activism can have unintended consequences, including exposure to legal risks and the amplification of official surveillance. Activists are also often unable to control the political effects of their footage or the purposes to which it is used. We conclude by assessing the impact that transformations in both protest organization and media technologies might have for counter-surveillance techniques based on visual surveillance.
Surveillance & Society, 2018
This article analyses protesters' reactions to police video surveillance of demonstrations in Germany. Theoretically, we draw on the concept of a " spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance " to understand the interaction processes which—intentionally or not—contribute to the deepening of the " surveillant assemblage " in the field of protest policing. After introducing video surveillance and its importance for selective protest policing, we discuss concepts of counter-surveillance. Widening the individualist scope of former research on " neutralisation techniques, " collective and interactive dimensions are added to cover the full counter-surveillance repertoire. We identified six basic categories of counter-surveillance moves: consider cameras, disguise, attack, hide, sousveillance, and cooperation. They can be classified along the axes of (a) degree of cooperation with the police, and (b) directedness (inwards/outward). It becomes obvious that activists are not predominantly deterred by video surveillance but adapt to the situation. If and how certain counter-surveillance moves are applied depends on the degree of exposure, perceptions of conflict dynamics, political interpretations, and on how these factors are processed in the respective security cultures. Security cultures, which are grounded in the respective relations between protest groups and police, are collective sets of practices and interpretive patterns aimed at securing safety and/or anonymity of activists as well as making their claims visible. Thus, they are productive power effects, resulting from the very conditions under which protest takes place in contemporary surveillance societies. This article elaborates on these ambiguities and unintended effects with regard to sousveillance and disguise techniques, such as masking or uniform clothing. The analysis is based on qualitative data collected between 2011 and 2016 consisting of group discussions and interviews with activists from different political spectra, journalists, politicians, and police officers, as well as observations of demonstrations and document analyses of movement literature. 1. The Problem About ten helmeted riot policemen lead a detained protester to a police car. One officer films the crowd of protesters following the police and their detained co-protester. One protester in turn films the police with his mobile loudly lamenting the behaviour of the police. The camera officer calmly keeps on videotaping until the police drive away with the detained (field protocol 077). This protest scene in Berlin could take place countless times at demonstrations all over the world. At first glance, we might observe a symmetry of visual power, which results in a relatively peaceful solution to a highly emotional, conflictive situation. This article discusses the very hopes for an 'equality of arms' in
Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest, and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’ (Waddington, 1999). Journalists who depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives have historically reproduced these distinctions (Hall et al, 1978) and as a result images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize their claims (Juris, 2005). However a number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK mean that police officers are also being subjected to distinctions made by inquiry panels between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus a new trope is emerging in popular print and online news narratives in which the actions of the police rather than protesters are becoming the object of the public’s attention. These dynamics will be explored with reference to the ways in which confrontations between protesters and police were pictured in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. It will focus in particular on the way in which images highlighting acts of concealment became a significant strand in on and off line news narrative as they developed in the years between Tomlinson’s death in 2009 and the civil suit bought against PC Harwood in 2012. It will argue that images of police officers in militarized helmets and without identity tags become synonymous with the opacity that initially characterized the police forces response to the death of Tomlinson. It will conclude by suggesting that this lack of transparency contrasted with the extended visibility offered by mobile phone footage of the demonstration and contributed to the police’s inability to frame G20 protesters as violent agitators.
This essay argues that we must look beyond the evidentiary functions of online videos of police violence, like those documenting Eric Garner's killing by the NYPD and the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina, to aesthetics as a response to the limits of juridical process. As merely evidence, these videos are " framed " by what the essay calls the " police hermeneutic, " which captures and diffuses their political potential through an interpretive monopoly. Looking closely at the videos surrounding the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant III on the Fruitvale BART station platform, the essay draws on Jacques Rancière's conception aesthetics in relation to the police order and Michel Foucault's description of the " spectacle of the scaffold, " to argue that a political potential inheres on the aesthetic level of these images. There the police distribution of bodies and subjects, and interpretation of events, is at once made visible and disrupted by the interventions of fellow travelers and their cell phones on the BART station and then digital media platforms. In the wake of more than two years of high profile killings of unarmed black men and women approximately 4000 police departments have initiated body mounted camera programs, while the US Justice Department has earmarked $20m to support and expand these programs. [1] [#N1] Though it is decidedly unlikely that the recent coverage of these incidents reflects any sort of quantitative increase in police violence toward people of color and the poor, a qualitative surge in public attention fuels this effort to increase and intensify the surveillance of law enforcement; no doubt this attention and subsequent response is, in part, a product of digital cellular phone videos and their Aesthetics, Politics, and the Police Hermeneutic: Online Videos of Po...
The contemporary media landscape is characterized by a fractured unevenness that unsettles the clearly demarcated boundaries, which constituted classical models of the public sphere. Police and protesters are traditionally represented in mainstream news coverage as occupying a binary in which the police are trusted and law-abiding and the protesters are not. Research into the way in which the relationship between police and journalists shapes mainstream representation of ‘violent’ protest has already been undertaken. Similarly the theoretical and actual potential of mobile and digital media to unsettle and challenge these top-down narratives has also been the subject of much academic attention. However, the way in which mainstream representations of the police force in general, and acts of police violence in particular, have impacted upon the demarcation of boundaries between citizens and protesters has yet to be explored. This chapter examines representation of resistance with particular reference to the legitimating potential of shifting us/them boundaries. It analysis the broadsheet coverage prompted by the death of Ian Tomlinson and argue that the police’s ability to frame protest is being undermined by technological, cultural and structural changes. It concludes by suggesting that these changes are impacting upon the representation of the police in such a way as to unsettle the ‘citizenship line’ (Waddington, 1999, p.61) that exists between protesters and publics.