Police Visibility

Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras

Bryce Clayton Newell

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520382916
• eBook ISBN: 9780520382923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note about Prior Publications
• Introduction
• 1   Visibility, Surveillance, and the Police
• 2   Privacy, Speech, and Access to Information
• 3   Bystander Video and “the Right to Record”
• 4   Policing as (Monitored) Performance
• 5   The (Techno-)Regulation of Police Work
• 6   Public Disclosure as “Direct to YouTube” Alternative
• Conclusion
• Methodological Note
• Appendix A. Tables
• Appendix B. Figures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index