Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television and Social Control

Clive Norris, Jade Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367605148
• eBook ISBN: 9781351896771
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The rise of CCTV camera surveillance in Britain has been dramatic. Practically every major city now boasts a CCTV system aimed at, among other things, preventing, detecting and reducing the fear of crime. Increasingly these developments are mirrored in villages, shopping malls, residential estates, transport systems, schools and hospitals throughout the country. In short, for the majority of citizens it is now impossible to avoid being monitored and recorded as we move through public space. Surveillance, CCTV and Social Control represents the first systematic attempt to account for this phenomenon. It brings together leading researchers from the fields of anthropology, criminology, evaluation, geography, sociology and urban planning to explore the development, impact and implications of CCTV surveillance. Accordingly attention is directed to a number of key questions. How does CCTV fit with the trends of late modernity? Does CCTV reduce crime or merely shift it elsewhere? How should CCTV be evaluated? What is the significance of CCTV for women's safety? How adequate is the regulation of CCTV? In the light of recent technological developments what is the future of CCTV surveillance?

Part one
INTRODUCTION

1 Introduction: power and vision

Clive Norris & Gary Armstrong

We collude with surveillance systems, whether willingly or reluctantly, wittingly or unwittingly. But if we object, we are unsure of our grounds for so doing. (Lyon, 1994: 18)

Introduction

It has become almost a journalistic cliche when writing about Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance to note that from the moment we leave the privacy of our homes, we are under almost permanent camera surveillance. The ubiquity of the cameras can be seen from their deployment in town centres, shopping malls, retail outlets and on the railway and tube networks. Traffic cameras monitor our speed and compliance with red lights and, schools, hospitals, universities and leisure centres are increasingly coming under the camera’s gaze. In short, in almost every area to which we have public access a camera is probably monitoring our movements. This book is an attempt to account for the rise of photographic surveillance in the context of 1990s Britain and to consider the issues that arise from the omnipresence of surveillance cameras in public space. Before outlining in more detail the contents of the book, this introductory chapter seeks to explore some of the more general aspects of the relationship between CCTV, power and surveillance.

Power and vision

Most of us are blessed with the ability to see. However, we learn from an early age to use this faculty with care. We are taught by our elders that ‘it is rude to stare’. Those who transgress find, that in some environments, their gaze is met by the menacing challenge of ‘what are you looking at?’ And, as many men will attest, if the answer is not placatory enough, violence ensues. As a result, according to Goffman we learn to make:

… an exquisite perpetual distinction between being looked at and being stared at, and, God help us, learn to suspect, if not detect, that the latter is being masked by the former. (1972: 64)

Thus while we walk in public space we are constantly scanning the immediate environment and orientating our actions to others’ co-presence so we do not collide. But the gaze is not fixed and as a rule, the eyes do not dwell, and if the gaze is met the eyes of both parties are soon averted (Goffman, 1972: 249). The regulation of the gaze is essentially woven with maintaining what Goffman refers to as the ‘territories of the self’ and the unsolicited intrusion of the gaze, like that of touch, is a violation of the boundaries of the self requiring a ‘remedial interchange’. While the law does not recognise the right of privacy in public space, it is clear that rules governing the production and reproduction of order in public space are finely attuned to its micro-sociological dimensions.

What is crucial here is that regulation of the ‘look’ is premised upon an equality of interactional resources between the person looking and being looked at. All those who use public space are able, and generally do, scan the immediate vicinity to check for the presence of others and monitor their orientation towards them. The recipient of an unsolicited gaze can return the gaze and hold it in an attempt to ‘stare the person down’; they can avert their eyes and move from the field of visibility; they can return it fleetingly and disapprovingly, or if desired, flirtatiously; finally they can verbally challenge the perpetrator.

In all these interactions there is a large degree of equality between the parties since the ‘victim’ can use a variety of interactional devices to defend the boundaries of self. This is one reason why both the role of ‘spy’ and ‘voyeur’ provoke such condemnation, since both try to conceal not only the motive behind their gaze, but that they are looking at all. In so doing the spy and voyeur deprive those subject to their gaze the possibility of challenge or the right to re-orientate their behaviour in the light of being watched. Thus they breech a fundamental, yet unwritten rule, of social interaction.

So far we have discussed the social dynamics of the ‘gaze’ in public space unmediated by the camera. However, it should be apparent that the introduction of cameras to monitor town centre streets fundamentally alters the nature of the interaction between the watcher and the watched. The interaction is, to use Giddens term, ‘distanciated’. Those who are watching are physically removed from the immediate vicinity of the watched as they are usually housed in publicly inaccessible control rooms. Increasingly the distances between the two are becoming greater as, with the advent of fibre optic cabling and satellite technology, it is now possible for monitoring to occur in different cities or even countries (Graham and Marvin: 1996).

As a consequence of this distanciation it is not routinely obvious, even by looking at the position of the cameras, whether a person is the object of attention. While the watcher can see the watched the reverse is not true. The watcher, at least in the more sophisticated systems, can zoom in to reveal the smallest details and monitor every nuance of their facial expressions and gesture for clues to their intentions. The watched have no such ability; whereas ordinarily the intentions and motivations of the watcher may be ‘read off’ from a person’s face by contextualising a ‘look’ as quizzical, threatening, lecherous etc, the veil of the camera denies the possibility of the reciprocal exchange of visual data.

Finally, the possibility of directly questioning and challenging the watcher is lost. The differences between the unmediated gaze of the eyes, and the camera mediated gaze of the CCTV operative illustrates the profound asymmetry of power inherent in CCTV monitoring.

It is this asymmetry that we now wish to explore in more detail. The use of CCTV cameras implies more than just the ability to watch. It also implies a relationship of power between the watcher and the watched. The English language is not blind to the relationship between power and vision and there are a number of words which fuse the two meanings: the English nouns ‘inspector’, ‘supervisor’ and ‘overseer’ and their verbs to ‘inspect’, ‘supervise’ and ‘oversee’, all connote a relative position of dominance and subordination and emphasise the visual element of that power.

But the camera changes the nature of the supervisory gaze. It expands the capacity of visual monitoring in both space and time. Inspection, for instance, suggests a periodic scrutiny, not continuous monitoring. The camera is, however, continually watching and has the ability, when coupled with a video-recorder, to enable the scrutiny of past, as well as contemporaneous, events. Moreover, it represents an extension of the architecture of disciplinary power encapsulated in Bentham’s 19th Century design for a new model prison with its central observation tower, allowing the guards to see everything without ever being seen themselves. For Foucault this Panoptican represents a crystallisation of the power of vision embodied in an architectural form.¹ Not only does it facilitate the power of the watchers over the watched by enabling swift intervention to displays of non-conformity but through the promotion of habituated anticipatory conformity. As Foucault notes:

He who is subject to a field of visibility, and knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power, he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles, he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (1977: 202–203)

Thus the power of surveillance is not merely that it is exercised over someone but through them and it is this subjective element of the operation of power which Foucault also wants to stress. Surveillance therefore involves not only being watched but watching over one’s self. Moreover in the Foucauldian sense panoptic surveillance implies an interaction, either real or potential, however mediated or distanciated, between the watcher and the watched. Unlike the gaze the voyeur, the panoptic gaze is always for the purposes of control, and always predicated on the potential mobilisation of power.

This mobilisation is at three levels, which mirror Lukes’ three dimensions of power (Lukes: 1974). The first dimension conceptualises power as the ability of a person A to get another, B , ‘to do something that B would not otherwise do’ and that this power can only be identified as a ‘concrete observable behaviour’ (Lukes: 1974, p 11–12). In this way CCTV represents a mobilisation of power through the capacity of the watchers to trigger a direct and authoritative response to observable non-conformity. For example, when the security manager of a Northern Irish shopping mall dispatched a security guard to insist (successfully, and presumably under the implied threat of expulsion) that a nursing mother refrain from breastfeeding her infant on a seat in one of the walk-ways in the mall, she was subject to an observable and concrete mobilisation of power.

In many instances, however, the success of CCTV is argued to be in its deterrence capacity: it prevents events from happening. These are, of course, ‘non-events’ which, by their nature, are unobservable. Thus when a person refrains from breaking into a car because they fear that the presence of CCTV cameras may lead to their identification and capture, power has been successfully mobilised, since the person refrained from what they would have otherwise have done. But nothing observable has occurred and it is not possible to determine in the individual case, had the cameras not been there, whether the crime would have taken place. The effects of this ‘second dimension’ are therefore methodologically difficult to determine. Even so, in policy terms, it is the believed efficacy of these second dimensional effects in reducing crime which has dominated CCTV’s political appeal.

It is the relationship of CCTV to Lukes’ ‘third dimension of power’ which has exercised most critical commentators. The academic and popular literature on surveillance and CCTV is replete with allusions to Nineteen-eighty-four, Big Brother, Brave New World, and the Panoptican (see Lyon, 1994). Here the conception of power goes beyond the first two dimensions to include a third, more insidious yet efficacious form of power. As Lukes states:

A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping and determining his very wants. (1974: 23)

As readers of Nineteen-eighty-four will be aware, the hero of the story, Winston Smith, eventually loses his struggle for autonomy and his ‘identity was merged with Big Brothers’ and his ‘very personhood was impugned’ (Lyon, 1994: 60). In Brave New World, the socialisation of genetically engineered human clones is managed in the Panoptic environment of the ‘Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms’. Here infants are subject to subliminal suggestions which ensure that the ‘child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind….But all these suggestions are our suggestions!’ (Huxley: 1955, 34). For Foucault, the Panoptican is the mechanism whereby surveillance can be fused with disciplinary techniques to create an ‘automatic functioning of power’ and facilitate the production of ‘docile bodies’.

Thus the relationship between surveillance and power is about the capacity to induce conformity not just by catching and punishing the deviant, or by deterring potential miscreants through the fear of detection, but by abolishing the potential for deviance. This is achieved through the process of centralised and institutionalised socialisation through which dominant norms and values are inculcated, making deviance literally unthinkable. However the applicability of these metaphors to the use of CCTV surveillance systems needs to be carefully considered.

For Foucault, Huxley and Orwell, surveillance is a necessary, but not sufficient condition of the ‘Brave New World’ where the ‘supreme exercise of power’ has been achieved by getting ‘another or others to have the desires you want them to have’ (Lukes 1974 p 23). Surveillance also needs to be coupled with techniques of behaviour modification, indoctrination, and socialisation. Thus while Giddens has argued that ‘Totalitarianism is, first of all, an extreme focusing on surveillance’ (1985: 303), the crucial observation is ‘first of all’, because it depends on coupling surveillance to other disciplinary mechanisms.

Thus, although critical commentators, are drawn to dystopian visions of CCTV, it is primarily because they are placing it in a dyadic relationship with other disciplinary techniques which promote conformity though internalised self control. While we do not deny the potential for this coupling to occur, we would argue that the rise of CCTV is connected to a drift away from the Old Penology with its concerns on the diagnosis, intervention and treatment of the individual offender. Rather following Feeley and Simons, it fits more squarely with the the rise ‘Actuarial Justice’ which:

… takes crime for granted. It accepts deviance as normal … its aim is not to intervene in individuals’ lives for the purposes of ascertaining responsibility, making the guilty ‘pay for their crime’ or changing them. Rather it seeks to regulate groups as part of a strategy of managing danger. (1994: 173)

The move towards actuarial justice is most readily seen in the expansion of the prison population in Britain and especially America, on strictly incapacitative criteria. No longer is the justification for prison cloaked in rehabilitative rhetoric, but stepped in the language of segregation. The logic of the American ‘three strikes and you’re out’ and the British ‘two strikes and you’re out’ is not the transformation of the individual offender but their permanent segregation and exclusion.

Indeed as Cohen (1985) has argued, the key dynamic in the history of social control is the movement and tension between inclusionary and exclusionary visions. Thus the growth of probation, community service orders, and cautioning indicates a drift towards more inclusionary strategies with all the implications of ‘wider and different nets’. Simultaneously, however, this inclusionary impulse is tinged with forms of exclusionary practice: the growing use of curfew orders on juveniles and the reintroduction of electronic monitoring of offenders (tagging) would seem to echo this trend. Meanwhile prison is still available for the recalcitrant.

The growth and use of televisual surveillance reflects this dynamic. It is inclusionary in so far as it induces conformity through fear of reaction, but exclusionary and net widening to the extent that it can mobilise a response in three main ways. First, to previously unnoticed acts, second to expel actual and potential deviants from specific locations, and finally to provide evidence against deviant populations to justify exclusion.

The CCTV gaze is therefore far more than just the ‘friendly eye in the sky’ since it potentially allows for the mobilisation of power on a range of dimensions, in a variety of situations, and for radically different purposes. And it is therefore far removed from the face-to-face gaze of persons across the street. Those subject to the gaze of the cameras cannot challenge the intrusion into the territories of the self; they cannot judge the motives of the observers and nor can they control how the images will be used. Neither are they able to judge whether the gaze is equally cast upon the whole population, or whether they are disproportionately targeted by virtue, not of their behaviour, but of their personal characteristics.

Surveillance, is then, first and foremost, a form of power with a number of dimensions which all raise important questions which move beyond the narrow confines of criminological concerns with effectiveness. Firstly, while it is certainly appropriate to ask whether CCTV reduces crime, a limited focus on outcomes and aggregate crime data tells us little about how it is producing these effects, for instance, is it through the increased detection and incapacitation of prolific offenders or through inducing anticipatory conformity? But CCTV is more than just about crime prevention. It enables a vast amount of visual data, in the form of images on the screen, to be processed and interpreted. What interpretive schemes guide operator judgments? What forms of behaviour or people trigger suspicion and at what point does this result in a deployment? Is this deployment confined to explicitly criminal concerns or is intervention directed at regulating matters of decorum and demeanour in public space and aimed at excluding certain types of people?

Second, while the powerful always have a tendency to promote their interests as the general interest, we need to ask whose interests are promoted in the deployment of CCTV systems. For instance are t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part one: Introduction
• Part two: CCTV and social theory
• Part three: CCTV in context
• Part four: Evaluating CCTV
• Part five: Questioning CCTV
• Part six: CCTV: The future and the past