Chapter 11 Police Body Cameras: Emotional Mediation and the Economies of Visuality
This paper seeks to think through the ways in which the design elements and affordances of police body worn cameras interact with overlapping discourses of transparency and technological optimism and contribute to an understanding of the body worn camera as a neutral technological mediator of fundamentally emotion laden human interactions. This understanding, which frames not only the camera itself but its resulting video evidence as somehow more clear, more easily read and more neutral elides the contingency of interactions with the police. State power is intimately tied to visuality both in an esthetic sense and in the ability to see and be seen. The centrality of technologies of visuality to projects of social control foreground the importance of control over representational methods. Time and again citizen documentation and photography become characterized as criminal while the acts they capture do not. This power is bolstered by an investment in the neutrality of technologies of surveillance and is simultaneously reinforced by the depiction of victims of police brutality as emotionally volatile and transgressive. Additionally, any discussion of body worn cameras must contend with the ways in which different people experience space and surveillance differently. By introducing the concept of paradoxical space in conjunction with discourses of surveillance and the elements of body camera design, we are able to understand how emotions become a part of an economy of visuality.