ABSTRACT
The development and expansion of the use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by the police is intelligible as an “expert system” within contemporary techno-bureaucratic rationality. The new visibility that BWCs introduce is paralleled by that brought about by public use of smartphone cameras to “sousveil” the police, with both forms of camera sometimes challenging and sometimes consolidating established policing practices. Key here are the power relationships at play, and it is suggested that BWCs will intersect many wider challenges already facing policing today such as issues of democratic accountability, police legitimacy including among minority citizens and communities, and cost effectiveness. Whereas, theoretically, there are certainly some “panoptic” qualities of these roving cameras, it is argued that police BWCs are not obviously “disciplinary” in the Foucauldian sense, and that their role in supporting police power on the street is often rather more forceful in nature. Contrasting police use of BWCs with “surveillance capitalism,” they can be considered instead an instance of “surveillant security.” BWCs represent just the first steps towards the technological transformation of policing, with all the threats to and opportunities for democratic policing this poses.
