Surveillance technologies and the crises of confidence in regulatory agencies

Abstract

Technology plays an increasing role in policing and other aspects of the criminal justice process. This article will briefly outline the notion of a criminal justice ‘techno-fix’ as a potential attempt by criminal justice agencies to use technology as a source of legitimacy. It will then go on to explore a range of alternate scenarios focusing on the possibility that increasing use of technologies in general, and surveillance technologies in particular (both in terms of formal surveillance by criminal justice agencies and informal surveillance of these agencies by sections of the general public) may actually contribute to challenges to the legitimacy of criminal justice agencies, in part because of deeply embedded but unrealistic cultural assumptions about the capabilities of technology.

Keywords

CCTV internet police violence public confidence surveillance technologies

As Jacobson (2004) indicates, use of technology by criminal justice agencies has a long and well-established history – for example the systematic use of forensic technologies by police forces which dates back to the late 19th century and the introduction of motor vehicles, radios and related technologies in the 20th century, which revolutionized models of policing (Emsley, 2009). But the period from the late 1980s onwards is one in which there is a proliferation of new technologies employed by criminal justice and other regulatory agencies to facilitate even the most mundane functions and activities (Brodeur, 2007; Nunn, 2001). But this is also a period in which the traditional state monopoly of access to surveillance technologies has been eroded, with a growing range of widely accessible technologies that can be utilized by the public to carry out informal surveillance, which is often incorporated into narratives that are critical of criminal justice and other state agencies (Cottle, 2008; Greer and McLaughlin, 2010a, 2010b; Jenkins, 2009).

Although much of the existing literature on technology and criminal justice focuses on the ability of surveillance technologies to contribute to the efficient and effective operation of agencies (Jacobson, 2004), there is an emerging literature that critically examines criminal justice-related technologies in a social context, particularly in the case of surveillance (Andrejevic, 2007; Ditton, 2000; Hier, 2003; Marx, 2003; Norris and McCahill, 2006). Within these debates about the relationship between technology and criminal justice there have been several attempts to explore potential connections between use of technology by criminal justice agencies and attempts to bolster public confidence in the legitimacy and capabilities of those agencies (Haggerty, 2004b; Kinsella and McGarry, 2011; Neyroud and Disley, 2008). Several writers have argued that one of the reasons for the proliferation of criminal justice technologies has been attempts by criminal justice agencies to tap into firmly established cultural perceptions of the abilities of technology to deliver significant improvements in performance, efficiency and effectiveness (Haggerty, 2004a, 2004b; Nunn, 2001). Haggerty (2004b) posits the emergence of a criminal justice ‘techno-fix’ in which technology and technological expertise are mobilized as sources of legitimation for criminal justice practices to augment the increasingly fragmented, critical and theoretical forms of knowledge and expertise traditionally provided by academic criminology.

But within these debates there is also a small and emerging literature which is beginning to explore an alternative possibility – that technologies utilized both by criminal justice agencies and by the public in their interactions with criminal justice agencies have the potential to undermine public confidence in these agencies (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010b; Kinsella and McGarry, 2011; Neyroud and Disley, 2008; Wells, 2007, 2008, 2011; Wilson and Serisier, 2010). It should be emphasized that this is still a largely unformed and speculative aspect of the debate on technologies and criminal justice agencies, and this current article is another speculative and theoretical intervention in this debate. While the possibility that technologies could inadvertently impact on public confidence in criminal justice agencies has been posited, there have been relatively few attempts to explore the precise manner in which these challenges to confidence may be engendered.

Using the example of surveillance, this article will attempt to explore the potential circumstances in which the use of technologies may contribute to challenges to public confidence in criminal justice agencies. It will do this by outlining and exploring three scenarios where there is apparent potential for surveillance technologies to generate a direct or indirect challenge to public confidence. It begins by examining the increasing availability of formal surveillance footage of misconduct by police and other agencies. It will then explore the growing use by sections of the public of smart phones and other widely available image recording devices (often in conjunction with social networking websites) to carry out informal surveillance of criminal justice agencies and disseminate critical images and information. It will then use the examples of the deployment of speed cameras by local Safety Camera partnerships and the wider use of surveillance technologies by local government agencies to explore some of the forms in which technologically mediated interactions between the public and regulatory agencies can engender public critiques of the agencies involved. Focusing on this third scenario (popular public narratives of the misuse of surveillance technologies by state agencies), the article will conclude with an examination of a range of perspectives from cultural theory and the sociology of technology to explore processes by which deeply embedded socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs regarding technology and its imagined abilities could impact on public attitudes to ‘real’ technologies and the agencies that utilize them.

Formal Surveillance Networks as a Source of Challenges to Confidence and Legitimacy?

Weitzer (2002) has charted the extent to which high profile media coverage of examples of police misconduct can reduce public confidence in the police (sometimes significantly). He found that these events are particularly prone to undermine public confidence for a prolonged period in the aftermath of initial media coverage. In this context, to what extent might an increase in the availability and use of surveillance technologies generate a growing pool of visually powerful images of misconduct by police which might in turn trigger the kinds of challenges to confidence and legitimacy charted by Weitzer?

One of the unintended consequences of the expansion of formal systems of surveillance such as CCTV has been the increasing incidence of ‘official’ surveillance footage used to publicize and prosecute cases of alleged malpractice by police officers. For example, in 2010 a Greater Manchester Police officer was convicted of assault and perjury as a direct result of local authority CCTV footage showing the officer repeatedly punching a suspect lying on the ground. This case received extensive coverage in TV news media, not least because of the visually powerful footage of police violence which featured extensively in reports (BBC, 2010a). Later in 2010, a Wiltshire police sergeant was dismissed and prosecuted after assaulting a female prisoner, with custody suite CCTV footage of the assault featured in the news media for several weeks (BBC, 2010b; Daily Telegraph, 2010b). Does the appearance of these narratives in mainstream media (and their identification as ‘newsworthy’ by news editors) reflect a profound shift in the nature of news and other broadcast media and their relationships to the State? Early accounts of the ideological context within which media coverage of crime is framed (Cohen, 1972; Hall et al., 1978) emphasize the dominant position of criminal justice agencies as primary definers of a crime narrative uncritically reproduced by the mainstream media. Within this context, allegations of malpractice or violence carried out by criminal justice agencies fail to gain wider purchase and are relegated to the margins of public discourse. McRobbie and Thornton (1995) suggest this conception of a homogeneous news media uncritically accepting official crime narratives has become untenable in an increasingly fragmented multi-mediated social reality, with proliferating, competing, contradictory and increasingly critical media narratives impacting on the reporting of crime. This fragmentation of any perceived media consensus on crime, and the emergence of potentially critical voices has required criminal justice agencies to become more aware of the need to manage public perceptions in order to maintain legitimacy (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010a; Mawby, 2002, 2010; McLaughlin, 2007 on ‘image led policing’). But this growing emphasis on the need to manage public impressions of criminal justice agencies opens up the possibility of the failure of impression management and the emergence of critical narratives in mainstream media. Taking the example of the policing of the 2009 G20 demonstration in London, Greer and McLaughlin (2010b) highlight the shift in the dominant narrative in media reporting in the aftermath of the demonstration. From initial media coverage focusing on the official narrative of protester violence, with the death of Ian Tomlinson during the demonstration presented as a tragic accident, there was shift towards a more critical focus on allegations of police brutality and the possibility of police involvement in Tomlinson’s death. The fact that many sections of the mainstream media were open to this critique of the police was partly a manifestation of:

the widespread decline in deference to authority and the escalation of news media adversarialism [which] have contributed to the creation of an unstable communicative space within which direct and high visibility challenges to the institutionally powerful have gained cultural, commercial and professional currency. (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010b: 1055)

But does this mean that the proliferation of formal networks of surveillance (and the increase in official surveillance footage of police malpractice that this could generate) inevitably contributes to a loss of public confidence in the criminal justice agencies involved? Perhaps we need to be mindful of the context within which these images enter the public domain. As Fairclough (2003) argues, in order to understand the potential effects of images, we need to consider the discourses within which the images are situated. The examples of violent behaviour by police officers briefly outlined earlier are typical of the manner in which ‘official’ surveillance footage of alleged police violence becomes public. Routinely, footage of this nature enters the public domain in the context of the prosecution of the officers involved. The behaviour is constructed as an aberrant/abhorrent act, and the prosecution can be seen in part as an attempt to minimize the potential impact on public confidence in the criminal justice agencies involved. Criminal justice agencies may indeed be operating under the gaze of an increasingly combatative and critical range of news media, but arguably the potential threat to confidence and legitimacy posed by images derived from official surveillance footage is frequently diffused by the situating of these images within a narrative of the identification and punishment of the individuals involved.

It is worth noting that the highly critical media response to the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the similar examples identified by Weitzer (2002) were not instigated by the release of official surveillance footage, but rather by the emergence of critical images and information gathered by members of the public. From the beating of Rodney King to the death of Ian Tomlinson, images that have triggered significant and highly visible public criticism of criminal justice agencies have not routinely been generated by formal technologies and networks of surveillance, but by technologies of informal surveillance utilized by members of the public. The potential of these technologies of informal surveillance to contribute to a reduction in public confidence in criminal justice agencies will be explored in the next section.

The Potential Challenges Posed by Sousveillance

As already noted, the turning point in the emergence of a critical media narrative on the policing of the 2009 G20 demonstration in London was the release to the Guardian newspaper by a member of the public of smart-phone video footage of the incident which caused Ian Tomlinson’s death – images which completely contradicted the official narrative of the circumstances leading to his death.¹ The fact that a member of the public was filming this incident is not a situational fluke – there is a growing incidence of protesters (and bystanders) using new video technologies, smart phones and other mobile devices to record and disseminate events in public order situations (Baker, 2012; Cottle, 2008), a development which has been increasingly associated with a potential ‘democratization’ of surveillance (Cottle, 2008; Dean, 2008; Marx, 2003). These technologies are increasingly being used to develop informal systems of inverse surveillance – the monitoring of criminal justice agents from ‘below’ or ‘sousveillance’ (Mann et al., 2003; Monahan, 2006; Wilson and Serisier, 2010). In contrast to the characterization of surveillance as the ‘few’ watching the ‘many’, sousveillance is conceived of as a situation in which potentially the ‘many’ watch the ‘few’ (Mathiesen, 1997). The expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) since the 1990s has facilitated a burgeoning range of networks of political activists able to disseminate information about alleged misconduct by the police (Couldry and Curran, 2003; Wilson and Serisier, 2010). Examples of internet-based networks include Fitwatch (http://www.fitwatch.org.uk/), Policewatch (http://visionon.tv/web/policewatch) and the Network for Police Monitoring (http://networkforpolicemonitoring.org.uk/). One of the key functions of sites of this nature is the dissemination of sousveillance images of alleged police misconduct and violence and (particularly in the case of Fitwatch), the publication of images of police officers engaged in photographing or filming protesters. But emerging networks of criminal justice sousveillance are not simply limited to these bespoke websites and blogs. After the UK General Election in May 2010, there was an upswell in public protests against new government policies. These protests ranged from large demonstrations in London and other major cities organized by trade unions and student groups to smaller localized demonstrations, pickets, occupations and protests organized by a diverse range of activist groups and anti-cuts organizations.

One thing that all of these public protests have in common is the extent to which a range of social networking and video sharing sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been incorporated into an informal sousveillance network which transcends the hardcore of anti-police websites and blogs to disseminate images of public order policing to a much wider audience, and (in the case of the English riots in 2011), allegedly to enable the co-ordination of disturbances by anti-police activists and criminal gangs (Baker, 2012). Indeed, the growing use of social media and new communication technologies such as smart phones by participants in demonstrations and disturbances has become so well established in the popular imagination that the 2011 English riots were described variously as the ‘Blackberry riots’ (The Economist, 2011) and the ‘Twitter riots’ (Sun, 2011). It has become commonplace for smart-phone equipped protesters to post sousveillance information, video footage and photographs on social networking and image sharing websites during demonstrations. In turn, ‘armchair’ demonstrators monitor social networks during the demonstration for relevant information and images, which they e-mail, repost or ‘re-tweet’ to try to disseminate sousveillance images to the widest possible audience. As a result, social networking and image sharing sites have become informal sousveillance repositories containing large amounts of publicly accessible information and images. (For example, a search of YouTube carried out in January 2012 using the phrase ‘police brutality’ yielded over 49,000 video clips, many of them sousveillance footage.) Consequently, given the development of an increasingly fragmented, critical and combatative media environment, allied to the emergence of sousveillance networks and a significant increase in the number of these publicly available images of alleged police violence, it could be argued that these developments have the potential to disrupt the ability of ‘image led policing’ to manage symbolic challenges to public confidence in the legitimacy of the police and other criminal justice agencies.

However, the assumption that this proliferation of sousveillance technologies automatically poses a significant challenge to public confidence is not without its problems. The fragmentation of forms of news and social media and the various other developments that have already been outlined all have a profound impact on the nature of the potential audience for these media narratives. In particular, the fragmentation of forms of media has been mirrored in the fragmentation of the audience (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). It is reasonable to suggest that in order for sousveillance images of police violence or other examples of malpractice to have a significant impact on public attitudes, they must be disseminated widely. But while social networking, video and image sharing sites have the potential to reach large audiences; in reality this ability is partial and conditional. As Wilson and Serisier (2010: 178) state: ‘The sheer ubiquity of distribution platforms and imaging devices does not in itself automatically equate to enhanced accountability of the powerful, nor does it inevitably lead to increased public condemnation of police brutality.’

Dean (2008) argues that one obstacle for the dissemination of potentially critical images is (paradoxically) the significant and increasing volume of these images available via social media and image sharing sites. Against the backdrop of tens of thousands of sousveillance images (often shaky, ambiguous and fragmented smart-phone video clips lacking information about context), potentially powerful and damaging footage can easily become subsumed in an avalanche of competing images. Jenkins (2009), using the example of YouTube, argues that the potential ability of social media and image sharing sites to disseminate critical images and information to a global audience is also significantly curtailed by the behaviour of audiences themselves. Those images which do reach an audience in the tens of millions tend to feature banal, innocuous, ‘entertaining’ themes that do not challenge dominant tastes and norms, whereas Jenkins argues that critical or challenging images become the preserve of small, marginal ‘niche-publics’.² There is a growing recognition that audiences do not engage with social media and image sharing websites in an uncritical and undifferentiated fashion. Rather, there is a tendency to use these resources to construct virtual social networks of like-minded individuals engaging with sources of information that reflect the views of this niche audience (Andrejevic, 2007). In their research on Australian video activists, Wilson and Serisier (2010) found that even among the activists themselves there is a perception that their images of police violence and misconduct reach a relatively limited audience of individuals already predisposed to be suspicious of the State in general and the criminal justice system in particular. Wilson and Serisier (2010: 177) argue that rather than simply conceptualizing sousveillance as a manifestation of the ‘many’ watching the ‘few’, it is perfectly feasible that sousveillance can often be an exercise in the few watching the few.

Up to this point, this article has examined the possible roles that technologies of surveillance/sousveillance could play in bringing images of police violence and malpractice into the public domain and thus potentially generating the kinds of challenges to public confidence in policing and other criminal justice functions identified by Weitzer (2002) and others. But we have also seen that the ability of these images to engender public critique of policing is partial and diffuse. Surveillance footage of police misconduct is routinely located in reassuring media narratives of the prosecution and punishment of the ‘bad apples’ involved, while (notwithstanding examples such as the death of Ian Tomlinson), sousveillance footage of police misconduct is largely relegated to the preserve of niche audiences already pre-disposed to be critical of the criminal justice system.

In both cases the disjunctures and difficulties emerge in the context of the relationships between surveillance/sousveillance images and the wider public as audience. But what happens if we shift the focus away from the public as an audience for surveillance images towards the notion of the public as the subject of surveillance technologies, as participants in the ‘surveillant assemblage’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000)? In order to do this we need to shift the focus to examples of technologically mediated interactions between the general public and the police and other regulatory agencies.

Everyday Surveillance and the ‘Misuse’ of Technology?

Perhaps a good place to begin this section is with interactions between the public and police in the context of the enforcement of traffic regulations. The reasons for this are twofold. First, road/traffic policing is a clear example of the trend towards collapsing the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing (Brodeur, 2007) in the context of the increasing use of surveillance technologies to facilitate essential but mundane policing functions (Goldsmith, 2005; Kinsella and McGarry, 2011; Wells, 2007, 2008). Second, traffic policing is one of the routine encounters between the public and criminal justice agencies that has significant potential to impact adversely on public confidence in criminal justice (Goldsmith, 2005; Hinds, 2009; Kinsella and McGarry, 2011; Neyroud and Disley, 2008; Wells, 2007, 2008, 2011). As Goldsmith, (2005: 452) argues:

Enforcing traffic laws even in democracies poses a particular challenge for public trust in police. It generates a high number of citizen contacts, including with citizens historically or socially otherwise disposed to support police, in situations in which strict enforcement is likely to leave citizens disgruntled if not handled carefully.

Using the example of speed cameras, Wells (2008, 2011) has argued that traffic enforcement has become a classic example of a criminal justice ‘techno-fix’. The introduction of speed cameras and related surveillance technologies used to monitor British roads has to be set in the context of an emerging official narrative that equated risks to the safety of law-abiding road users with the actions of ‘risky’ motorists who posed a threat due to their habit of travelling in excess of the speed limit and/or driving vehicles which were not taxed, insured or in possession of a valid road safety certificate. (See, for example, Department for Environment, Transport and Regions, 2000; Department for Transport, 2003.) The ‘techno-fix’ for these perceived risk bearing actors was the widespread introduction of speed cameras and automated number plate recognition systems, which offer the possibility of a comprehensive, relatively low cost and above all objective, unquestionable and implicitly ‘fairer’ mechanism for dealing with speeding drivers and drivers of untaxed, unsafe and uninsured vehicles (for an example of the continued use of this narrative see Daily Telegraph, 2011b).

The public (and media) response to the implementation of a camera-based system for monitoring vehicles highlights several problems with the criminal justice ‘techno-fix’. Within a relatively short period of time, public confidence in this surveillance system as a mechanism for making roads ‘safer’ began to show a marked decline, to be replaced with a growing popular perception that speed cameras were simply being used to generate income from law-abiding motorists (see, for example, Daily Telegraph, 2010a), and that number plate recognition technology used to trap ‘irresponsible’ drivers was being used inflexibly and unfairly, to the detriment of ‘normal’ drivers (Kinsella and McGarry, 2011). In their review of research into public attitudes to speed cameras, Gains et al. (2005: 66) found that between 1999 and 2004 the percentage of respondents in the UK who agreed with the statement ‘cameras are an easy way of making money out of motorists’ rose nationally from 45 per cent to 55 per cent, but in some regions of the UK rose to over 70 per cent. Paradoxically, public resentment at the use of speed cameras focuses significantly on the removal of the discretionary power of individual police officers and its replacement with an objective (and hence literal) implementation of the legislation relating to speeding offences (Wells, 2007, 2008). As Wells (2011: 226) argues:

despite considerable efforts being expended over almost a decade to persuade those at risk that, by speeding, they too pose a risk to their own and others’ safety, the use of speed cameras to enforce speed limits apparently failed to capture a significant proportion of the public’s imagination as a legitimate road safety or criminal justice intervention. The causal chains proposed by traditionally conceived experts such as central and local government and the police, and the probabilistic risk calculations via which the use of speed cameras has been justified were not, it appears, uncritically accepted by all of those who are subject to them.

In her research on the attitudes of motorists towards the use of speed cameras, Wells (echoing Goldsmith, 2005) demonstrates that the implementation of a surveillance ‘techno-fix’ to regulate traffic brought many drivers into contact with the criminal justice system for the first time, which in turn posed some quite profound ontological challenges for these ‘normal’ citizens convicted of motoring offences. The increase in strict liability convictions brought about by the introduction of speed camera and number plate recognition technology (and the de facto ‘net widening’ which they engendered) blurs the comfortable distinction between ‘responsible’ road users and those who put the public at risk as a result of their dangerous or thoughtless actions. The motif of the dangerous driver caught on camera that was increasingly utilized in the news media and other emerging narratives that were increasingly used to justify the use of technology in the policing of motoring offences does not easily equate with many of the drivers caught speeding by cameras in everyday life. The response of ‘normal’ drivers convicted of these offences is often to refute any suggestion that they have driven recklessly or dangerously (and to reject any of the culturally constructed labels associated with the ‘dangerous’ driver) by de-legitimizing both the agencies that have prosecuted them and the narratives of speed-related danger that underpins official discourse on road safety. The prosecution of ‘normal’ drivers is routinely conceptualized as a diversion from the process of pursuing ‘real’ criminals. This process can in part be seen in the ‘democratization of expertise’ that Wells (2011) identifies in the responses of convicted drivers – a process in which the expertise and competence of the agencies that enforce speed restrictions are de-legitimized. The literal enforcement of the speed limit and the underlying assumption that excess speed is dangerous in every circumstance is reconstructed as inflexible, unreasonable and unfair. This is contrasted with alternative forms of expertise (not least the expertise of the drivers themselves), which re-constitutes the risks associated with excess speed as context specific, and foregrounds the ability of ‘responsible’ drivers to use their discretion to adopt the speed appropriate for any given circumstance.

But the enforcement of traffic regulations is not the only area in which the public have found themselves subject to a perceived unfair and inappropriate use of surveillance technologies and powers. Another example (which is specific to the UK), has been the public response to the surveillance of residents by local government agencies and the perceived misuse of part 2 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000 (RIPA). This legislation was introduced to regulate the surveillance powers of state agencies tasked with detecting and preventing terrorism, crime and disorder or maintaining the health, well-being and safety of the public. From 2000 until its revision in February 2011, local authority agencies have frequently used RIPA to justify the use of expensive surveillance technologies to monitor residents suspected of engaging in a range of relatively minor offences (see, for example, BBC, 2009; Daily Telegraph, 2011a). Extensive media coverage of this issue highlighted the extent to which RIPA-related surveillance was being used to monitor issues such as dog fouling, fly tipping, littering and (in one very high profile case) ensuring that a family actually lived in the catchment area of the school attended by their children (Daily Telegraph, 2008). As with the discussion of speed cameras above, the use of surveillance here is reconceptualized in mediated debate around legislation and technology that should be used to catch ‘real’ criminals, but instead is being misused to spy on ‘ordinary’ citizens.

The 2008 story in the Daily Telegraph is a case in point – a system developed ‘to catch terrorists’ is used to spy on a ‘middle class family’. As with speed cameras, the use of surveillance technologies in these contexts is conceptualized as inappropriate and unfair, and the legitimacy of those who have used surveillance against ordinary citizens is routinely questioned, but this rarely translates into a fully formed critique of surveillance per se. In these examples of public responses to perceived misuse of surveillance technologies, we see a significant tension emerging between support for the appropriate use of surveillance technologies and concerns that the wrong members of society have become the subjects of the surveillant gaze. This tension is rooted in the fact that, as Hier (2003: 400, emphasis in original) argues:

The imperative [for surveillance] is not located in powerful social actors or elite bodies. Rather … considerable foundational support derives from popular social grievances, various antagonisms directed at a variety of socially constituted risk groups from below, which come to secondarily culminate in the intensification of top down regimes of surveillance.

Arguably, the mobilization of these regimes of surveillance only commands widespread public confidence as long as the subjects of the surveillance gaze are the socially constituted risk groups that Hier refers to. The criminal justice techno-fix promises the possibility of greater and more effective control of unruly, marginal and deviant behaviour, but in practice actually brings a wider range of ‘normal’ citizens under the gaze of regulatory agencies. ‘We’ appear to manage this apparent anomaly by frequently constructing a counter narrative of the deligitimization of the regulatory agencies who have ‘misused’ the technology by unfairly and unflexibly mobilizing it against ‘us’ rather than against ‘them’ – the ‘real’ criminals, who by rights should be the sole subjects of the surveillance and regulatory gaze.

The early sections of this article explored the possibility that public responses to surveillance/sousveillance images of police violence against protesters and other ‘natural’ subjects of the surveillance gaze were often conditional, diffused and partial. In the examples we have looked at so far in this section of the article, we see the potential emergence of a much more complex response from members of the general public once they themselves become subjects of this surveillance. But why does the small but growing body of research explored in this section suggest that a frequent potential response of the public as subjects of surveillance driven regulation is to produce a critique not of surveillance technology as such, but of its misuse by human agents? Why does this dissatisfaction with aspects of the techno-fix manifest itself in popular critiques of the agencies utilizing these surveillance technologies rather than in the emergence of a full-blown critique of surveillance per se? Mainstream/popular critiques of surveillance stubbornly cling to the narrative that surveillance technologies have a role to play, but are often misused in the unfair practices of state agencies. In order to develop possible explanations for the persistence of this narrative, this article will conclude with a brief overview of the extent to which public attitudes to technology in late modernity are culturally, symbolically and rhetorically constructed.

Public Attitudes to Surveillance Technologies – Techno-Fix versus Technophile?

Perhaps the best place to begin this section on the symbolic construction of technology in late modern society is with the questions posed by Sturken and Thomas (2004: 3) who ask: Why are emergent and new technologies the screens onto which our culture projects such a broad array of social concerns and desires? Why is technology the object of such unrealistic expectations?

Nye (2004) argues there is a long history of technological innovations being embraced as comprehensive solutions to complex social problems, only for them subsequently to fall far short of these utopian predictions. But paradoxically these repeated disappointments have not reduced the popular conception of the ability of technology to deliver significant outcomes, because the redemptive/restorative power of technology in the popular imagination is a product of technologies symbolic meanings rather than its demonstrable ability to address functional needs.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the cultural representation of technology and its apparent ability radically to transform social life. Sobchack (2004) uses science fiction as an example of the extent to which the ‘essence’ of technology which is culturally constructed in these texts impacts on public perceptions of technology. Technology is symbolically constructed as capable of bringing about a significant change partly because of its perceived objectivity and neutrality – technology is beyond the constraints and strictures of social life and is therefore able to operate in an unhindered fashion:

The transformative power awarded to new technologies is directly related to the idea that technologies arise not of the world in which we live but as a force that comes magically from elsewhere, a force seemingly outside of social and political influences. (Sturken and Thomas, 2004: 4)

But paradoxically this perceived independence from external influences that makes the symbolically constructed image of technology so attractive is in many respects the thing that creates the significant mismatch between imagined technology and the reality of technology in everyday life. As Winner (1997) suggests, technologies are inextricably embedded within the fabric of everyday life, and technological innovation and change has the power to reshape significantly our social environment and social circumstances – but frequently not in the ways that we imagined or expected it to. Given Nye’s (2004) assertion that despite these repeated and ongoing experiences of a recurring mismatch between the promise and the reality of technology we never give up on the myth of technology, the ontological mechanisms we use to manage this ongoing mismatch become crucial. The mechanisms identified in this literature are significant given the examples discussed earlier in this article. The narratives that explain the apparent failure, or the unintended consequences of technological innovation, are routinely rooted in the impact of human agency, the intrusion of those social and political influences that technology is imagined as being free from. So technologies routinely fail to deliver the outcomes that we expected of them because of the humans implementing the technology – the technology fails because of its misuse. Consequently the fault lies not with the technology but with the humans responsible for implementing it.

Can we trace this tendency through into the operation of criminal justice? One way to do this would be to start specifically with cultural representations of criminal justice. Sparks (1992) highlights a significant disjuncture between fictional representations of investigative processes and the everyday reality of criminal investigation. The fictional investigation is embedded in a reassuring moral discourse – the perpetrator is always apprehended, justice is always done. If we examine contemporary fictional crime narratives we find that this tendency has not changed. But the infallible skills of the detective have increasingly been augmented (or in some cases supplanted) by an influx of science and technology. In their study of the forensic science drama CSI, Cavender and Deutsch (2007) argue that one of the appeals of these forensics science dramas is their ability to combine the moral authority of the traditional fictional detective with the moral authority of popular (mis)conceptions of science and technology. Thus the inevitability of fictional justice is bolstered by the introduction of science and technology, which make even the smallest clue open to the investigative gaze. But as Harvey and Derkson (2009) suggest, for a generation raised on unrealistic TV police dramas which portray the apprehension of criminals as inevitable and unproblematic, the addition of a fictional forensic science discourse which portrays the analysis of physical evidence as both a speedy and unambiguous process simply exacerbates the mismatch between the imagined and real investigative processes. But this unrealistic representation of the capabilities of technologies utilized by the criminal justice system is not restricted to forensic science. The increasing representation of surveillance technologies in popular culture (see Doyle, 2003; Groombridge, 2002; Marx, 1996) offers an exaggerated picture of surveillance technologies as unproblematically capable of identifying and tracking suspects, of producing crystal clear images of suspects that can be effortlessly cross-referenced with criminal records to produce virtually instantaneous identification, and so on. But Doyle (2003) argues that the representation of surveillance technologies in popular culture also constructs a stereotypically deviant other as subject of surveillance – so the representation of surveillance in popular culture not only exacerbates the mismatch between the imagined and actual capabilities of the technology, but also (as noted earlier) between the imagined and actual subjects of the surveillance gaze.

Which is where we return to the possibility of public confidence in technologies inadvertently undermining confidence in the agencies that employ them. As a number of forensic scientists have begun to note, for a public increasingly familiar with the speed, efficiency and certainty of forensic technology in CSI, the reality that the results of tests on physical evidence can often take several weeks to arrive (and may turn out to be partial or inconclusive) is often regarded as a manifestation of incompetence or inefficiency on the part of real forensic scientists (see, for example, Starrs, 2005). It could be argued that the same mismatch between the capabilities of imagined and real surveillance technologies could result in similar public responses to those agencies utilizing real surveillance technologies.

Conclusion

The possibility that technologies utilized by criminal justice agencies could impact on levels of public confidence in those agencies is a potentially significant but under-explored aspect of the wider debates around criminal justice and technology.

Given the research discussed earlier in this article which identified relationships between high profile media coverage of police misconduct and increases in dissatisfaction with the police among some sections of the public (Weitzer, 2002), it could be reasonable to argue that an increase in images of violent behaviour and misconduct by police officers captured by surveillance systems and the growing networks of sousveillance could have an impact on public perceptions of policing. But as I have tried to argue, any such assumptions need to recognize the complex context within which these images are disseminated to potential audiences. There are undoubtedly a significant number of images of misconduct ‘out there’, with sites such as YouTube becoming significant repositories of both sousveillance images and clips of mainstream news media footage. But it should be (re)emphasized that the potential for these images to reach a wide range of audiences is not the same as actually being viewed by (and influencing) these audiences, and future research into possible relationships between surveillance/sousveillance images and public confidence should avoid the temptation to conflate these two assumptions.

Paradoxically, some of the strongest of the (admittedly limited) current evidence of the possibility of surveillance technologies having an adverse impact on public confidence comes not from these often spectacular surveillance/sousveillance images of disorder and violence, but from the relatively mundane contexts within which increasing numbers of citizens find themselves as the subjects of surveillance in contexts such as traffic policing. The use of surveillance technologies in the identification and prosecution of ‘law-abiding’ citizens undoubtedly has the potential to problematize relationships between these citizens and the criminal justice agencies involved. As I have tried to demonstrate in the latter stages of this article, the manner in which ‘ordinary’ citizens who find themselves ‘caught’ by these surveillance technologies manage the challenge to their self-identification as ‘law-abiding’ citizens raises some interesting questions about the role of technology in our society. There is a distinct possibility that citizens who are ‘caught’ by technology will potentially choose to question the legitimacy not of the technology but of the agencies that have chosen to misuse that technology by mobilizing it against ordinary citizens. This is an interesting and potentially fruitful area for future research.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Tony Kearon is a senior lecturer in Criminology at Keele University. His current research interests include the social construction of criminal identities in late modernity, popular cultural representations of crime and policing in general, and cultural representations of forensic science and psychological profiling in particular.

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