Weaponizing neutrality: the entanglement of policing, affect, and surveillance technologies

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, U.S. police departments have incorporated media technologies that promise to make policing more efficient and “race-neutral,” including body and dash cameras, drones, and predictive analytics. Such tools are positioned as unbiased and therefore reliable instruments that will hold both the state and citizens accountable during police interactions. This neutrality occurs along axes of race and affect, and presumes these technologies as anti-emotional third-party witnesses to exchanges between the state and public. In this article, we connect the expansion of high-tech policing to the racialized and gendered management of affect, underscoring how the supposed accountability offered by these technologies does not upend the disciplining of emotion. We examine the relationship between affective governance and media technologies through an analysis of Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live video of police killing her boyfriend Philando Castile, which we theorize alongside the dash camera video of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was pulled over by a police officer and arrested, and who allegedly died by suicide in jail three days later. We argue that taken together, the videos demonstrate the ongoing racialized and gendered imperative that Black women regulate their emotional reactions to state violence both despite and because of the presence of recording devices.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• affect
• surveillance
• digital media
• policing
• colorblindness

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jackie Arcy, Brittany Farr, and the anonymous reviewers for their generative and helpful feedback and suggestions. We would also like to thank Old Dominion University’s Program for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, which provided the research support to make this collaboration possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The imposition on Black people to film encounters even prior to police arrival was starkly underscored in June 2020 when Christian Cooper, a Black man birding alone in Central Park, filmed a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation) as she screamed at him and called the police with the false accusation that he was threatening her life after he asked her to obey the law and leash her dog.

2. Predictive policing’s widespread uptake by police departments is a crucial part of a broader assemblage of algorithmic governance and high-tech policing but is outside the scope of this article.

3. In “Wasting the Future: The Technological Sublime, Communications Technologies, and E-waste,” Sabine LeBel (2012) describes the longstanding fetish of new technologies, specifically the notion that they are democratizing. This future-oriented “technological sublime” discourse evinces a strong belief in “the promise of social harmony” through putatively better technology and communication (9).

4. For instance, in 2009, the National Institute of Justice disbursed funds to seven police departments across the country to explore the implementation of predictive analytics.

5. This has, of course, only intensified recently in the wake of police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others.

6. Algorithmic governance refers to the capture, management, and use of data in order to manage populations by automated systems that “[regulate] the flows of [our] data and information.” See Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (2015, 169).

7. See, for example, Allissa Richardson, “Videos of Black People’s Killings are Sacred—So Stop Sharing Them,” Yes! Magazine, June 1 2020, https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2020/06/01/videos-black-killings-lynching/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allison Page

Allison Page, PhD, holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Her first monograph, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery, is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. E-mail: [email protected].

Carmen Jones

Carmen Jones is a PhD student in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include race, affect theory, gender studies, social justice, and prison abolition. E-mail: [email protected].