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Abstract
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communication. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for resistance in a time when digital police media have given rise to alarming strategies for surveilling populations, stifling dissent, and exerting control over public and private space.
Notes
[1] See, for instance, Timothy Lenz, Changing Images of Law in Film and Television Crime Stories (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), and the essays in the collected volume Entertaining Crime, eds. Gray Cavendar and Mark Fishman (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transactions, 1998).
[2] Kathleen Battles, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
[3] Mariana Valverde, Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
[4] Nicole Hahn Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films And Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
[5] The co-constitutive rise in neo-liberal political ideology and law and order policing was first articulated by Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan 1978).
[6] For a specific example of popular representations of law and order policing during the war on terror see Jack Bratich “Secret Agents and Popular Occulture,” in Secret Agents: Popular Icons Beyond James Bond, ed. Jeremy Packer (New York: Peter Lang 2009), 133–62. This period is more broadly described in James Hay and Mark Andrejevic, “Toward an Analytic of Governmental Experiments in These Times: Homeland Security as the New Social Security.” Cultural Studies 20. 4–5 (2006): 331–48.
[7] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004), 6–8.
[8] Cf. Peter K. Manning, who writes that “The police face a communications problem: how to anticipate, respond to, mediate, and filter rising citizen demand with a controlled and calculated strategy. Police forces are based on complex communication systems and are dramatic, quasi-judicial organizations structured to allocate and deploy officers across time and space.” Symbolic Communication: Signifying Calls and the Police Response (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 3.
[9] Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
[10] Sybille Kramer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler's Conception of Media.” Theory, Culture & Society 7–8 (2006): 93–109.
[11] Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon 1984), 244.
[12] Stan Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” in Scroope 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Architecture School 1998), 71–79.
[13] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007).
[14] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 44
[15] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 45.
[16] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 45.
[17] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 48.
[18] Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 49.
[19] As we address later in the essay, this trajectory has often been described as the shift from disciplinarity to governmentality. Regardless of the specific vocabulary, Foucault explained that there have not been simple replacements of one form of power by another (e.g., sovereignty replaced by disciplinarity replaced by governmentality), but rather that these three become fluid, with their interplay leading to one becoming more or less predominant at a given time. Cf. Security, Territory, Population 106–8.
[20] Here we borrow from Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, who synthesized Foucault and Latour to coin “government at a distance.” See “Governing Economic Life.” Economy and Society 19 (1990): 1–31.
[21] Kelly Gates, “The Tampa ‘Smart CCTV’ Experiment.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 2 (2010): 85.
[22] The whistle began to appear in English policing in about 1880, when it succeeded the police rattle (Critchley 1967, 151). Perhaps the earliest logistical medium in English policing history is the horn, which had been introduced into policing patrols at least by 1302. DeWindt and DeWindt argue that this is among the earliest uses of the horn for policing purposes. See Anne Rieber DeWindt and Edwin Brezette DeWindt, Ramsey: The Lives of an English Fenland Town, 1200 –1600 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 331, fn. 66. Noting that police patrols at this time were civilian-run and organized around pacts of mutual responsibility, police official and legal historian Frederick Pollock implies that households were required to keep, along with knives and bows, horns to help in policing efforts. See Pollock, Frederick. The History of English Law Before the Time of King Edward, Vol. 2 (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1907), 577. In the fifteenth century, night watchmen—who performed police duties at night—were required to carry horns as they patrolled their villages. These watchmen—who were eventually outfitted with bells and trumpets—were moved to distributed police watchtowers, from which they would send customized alerts based upon the threat to the community. See Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, Encyclopedia of Antiquities: and Elements of Archaeology, Ancient and Medieval, Vol. 1. (London: John Nichols and Son, 1825), 472.
[23] See R. W. Stewart, “The Police Signal Box: A 100-Year History.” Engineering Science Education Journal 3 (1994): 161–68.
[24] Rachel Hall, Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
[25] Battles, Calling All Cars.
[26] See, for instance, John Durham Peters “Calendar, Clock, Tower,” in Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, ed. Jeremy Stolow (New York: Fordham University Press 2012), in which he argues the logistical and organizational roles of media have been far too often overlooked.
[27] Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Economic Life.” Economy and Society 19 (1990): 1–31. Miller and Rose borrow this framework from Ian Hacking's influential Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
[28] “Governing Economic Life,” 7–8.
[29] See, for example, Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Ronald Walter Greene, “Lessons from the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation, and Pastoral Power,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, eds. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (London: Routledge 2012), 219–30; Laurie Oullette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); and Shayne Pepper, “Public Service Entertainment: Post-Network Television, HBO, and the AIDS Epidemic,” dissertation at North Carolina State University, 2011.
[30] James Hay has provided a macro-scale approach to media as technologies of liberal government in his investigation of the historical role of cinema, radio, and television as mechanisms for “the spatial rationalization of bodies, movements, knowledge, and observation” in succeeding urban renewal initiatives in the US Such an approach is more in line with ours, though Hay's media of choice are mass-media whereas we focus on media explicitly designed or applied to policing in its narrow sense. See James Hay, “The Birth of the ‘Neoliberal’ City and Its Media,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, eds. Jeremy Packer and Steven B. Crofts Wiley (London: Routledge 2012) 126; 121–40.
[31] Discipline and Punish, 90–93; 104–7. Also see especially Foucault's “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. Three, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: Norton, 2000), 1–88.
[32] Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen, ed. Aaron Thomas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 79.
[33] Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen, ed. Aaron Thomas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 79–80.
[34] Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen, ed. Aaron Thomas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 79.
[35] H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
[36] For a fuller description of this medieval watch-and-ward policing method, see Joshua Reeves, “If You See Something, Say Something: Lateral Surveillance and the Uses of Responsibility.” Surveillance & Society 10.3/4 (2012): 240–42.
[37] T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales, 900–1966 (London: Constable Press, 1967), 42.
[38] See Colquhoun's Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (London: H. Fry for C. Dilly, 1796), where he bemoans the “absurd prejudice” that pitted a reluctant general public against the fledgling police force: “that the best laws that ever were made can avail nothing, if the public mind is impressed with an idea that it is a matter of infamy to become the casual or professional agent to carry them into execution” (213–4).
[39] For more on how communication technologies are used to organize police patrols across time and space, see Richard V. Ericson and Kevin D. Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 388–411, and Peter K. Manning, The Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology, and the Rationality of Crime Control (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
[40] Patrick Colquhoun, Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames, Containing a Historical View of the Trade of the Port of London (London, 1800), 41.
[41] Patrick Colquhoun, Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames, Containing a Historical View of the Trade of the Port of London (London, 1800), 281.
[42] David Garland, Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 31.
[43] L. J. Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 114.
[44] For a theoretical overview of lateral surveillance and a description of its contemporary trends, see Mark Andrejevic, “The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance.” Surveillance and Society 2 (2005): 479–97.
[45] Colquhoun, Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 101.
[46] Colquhoun, Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 100–104.
[47] Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. VIII, ed. John Bowring (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1843), 392. Quoted in Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy, 152.
[48] The hue and cry policing method was the foundation of medieval crime response in England. Once a crime was committed, witnesses would raise a “hue and cry”—utilizing their voices, whistles, and whatever else they had on hand—and would trail the criminal until s/he was captured. Thus every male citizen could be deputized into an ad-hoc police force at any moment. For an overlook of the hue and cry and other pre-modern policing practices, see Critchley A History of Police 1–28, and Lucia Zedner, “Policing before and after the Police: The Historical Antecedents of Contemporary Crime Control,” British Journal of Criminology 46 (2006): 78–96. Also see en. 21 above.
[49] See Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1770 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 47–50.
[50] J. T. Barber Beaumont, “Regulations of Police for the Prevention of Disorders and Violence,” in The Pamphleteer: Dedicated to Both Houses of Parliament, Vol. XIX (London: 1822), 131.
[51] Nathaniel Conant, “Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Committee on the State of the Police of the Metropolis,” in Report from the Committee on the State of the Police of the Metropolis (London: 1816), 16.
[52] See “Much of the lengthy intellectual history of criminology,” writes Piers Beirne, “has been dominated by the belief that physical features are external signs of inner and spiritual darkness” in Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of Homo Criminalis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 187. Beirne's work traces the historical development of Homo criminalis in the criminological imagination, showing how typologies of the criminal were especially dominant in the nineteenth century and accompanied sociological attempts—such as those by Adolphe Quetelet—to theorize the “common man” (1–6).
[53] For work on the relationship between media—particularly photography—and eugenics, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), 343–87; and Phillip Prodger, Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[54] R. W. McClaughry, “Publisher's Preface,” in Alphonse Bertillon, Signaletic Instructions: Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification (Chicago: Werner, 1896), vii.
[55] See Kelly A. Gates, “Biometrics and Post-9/11 Technostalgia.” Social Text 23.2 (2005): 41. Also see Valverde, Law and Order, 74–6.
[56] See Armand Mattelart, The Globalization of Surveillance, trans. Susan Taponier and James A. Cohen (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 15–17.
[57] Alphonse Bertillon, Signaletic Instructions: Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification (Chicago: Werner, 1896), 249–58.
[58] See Anne Maxwell, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940 (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic, 2008), 65–7.
[59] Benjamin P. Eldridge, Our Rival the Rascal: A Faithful Portrayal of the Conflict between the Criminals of This Age and the Defenders of Society—the Police (Boston: Pemberton Publishing, 1896), 321.
[60] Benjamin P. Eldridge, Our Rival the Rascal: A Faithful Portrayal of the Conflict between the Criminals of This Age and the Defenders of Society—the Police (Boston: Pemberton Publishing, 1896), 55.
[61] Thomas Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America (New York: Cassell and Company, 1886), Preface.
[62] As Critchley points out, these innovations retained their prominence in twentieth-century policing: “From the early beginnings the forensic laboratory system has grown until today it is an integral part of the police service, employing pathologists, chemists, biologists, experts in hand-writing, and many others. Nowhere else, perhaps, is the quiet drama of police work so vividly presented to the layman as in these quiet laboratories, where the examination of blood-stained sheets, the comparison of hairs and bits of skin, the analysis of human organs pickled in jars, and the microscopic examination of stains, specimens, and minute tell-tale traces of all kinds from the scenes of innumerable crimes make up the daily work,” in A History of Police, 213–14.
[63] See Gary T. Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); also see Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 124–5.
[64] See, for instance, Charles Tempest Clarkson and J. Hall Richardson, Police! (London: The Leadenhall Press, 1889), 280–85.
[65] See footnote 45 of this article for more information about media in hue and cry-based policing.
[66] Critchley 109–10. Telegraph-based fire alarm systems came into use around this time as well. See R. W. Stewart, “The Police Signal Box: A 100-Year History.” Engineering Science and Education Journal 3.4 (1994): 161–68.
[67] G. Douglas Gourley and Allen P. Bristow, Patrol Administration (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1961), 179.
[68] G. Douglas Gourley and Allen P. Bristow, Patrol Administration (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1961), 179.
[69] Gourley and Bristow stress that police supervision is necessary to maintain discipline, but also to produce an extensive police record that can be used to determine future allocation of resources. Automating such surveillance through media is a common solution. See Haggerty and Ericson (FINISH, 1997).
[70] For decades, call boxes were accessible only to police. In the 1950s, an increasing number of these boxes were made available to civilians as a direct means of communication to police headquarters. Call boxes remained necessary well after the advent of police radio as they allowed for secrecy where radio failed. Further, they were less prone to the noise of bloated airways pushed beyond their bandwidth capacity. By the 1960s, call boxes were deemed economically inefficient due to the high density of public telephones (Gourley and Bristow).
[71] In different ways and for differing reasons, several scholars have suggested that automobiles might fruitfully be treated as media or communication technologies. See, for instance, Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill 1964); James Hay and Jeremy Packer, “Crossing the Media(-n): Auto-mobility, the Transported Self, and Technologies of Freedom,” in Media/Space: Scale and Culture in a Media Age, Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (New York: Routledge 2004) 209–32; and Sarah Sharma, “Taxis as Media: A Tempero-materialist Reading of the Taxi-Cab,” Social Identities 14.4 (2008): 457–64.
[72] Roads, in fact, had been a special preoccupation of police since their inception. In 1839, ten years after Robert Peel founded the modern public police force, a commission convened to assess the effectiveness of the new police. One of their major concerns was the insecurity of travelers on rural highways. See First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire as to the Best Means of Establishing an Efficient Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1839), 87–92.
[73] With the advent of the patrol car, we see the police striving to maintain a speed/territory edge on criminals. This became particularly germane during the Prohibition Era when bootleggers used increasingly faster cars for transporting alcohol (Packer 2008). The patrol car has been widely studied and invested in: for instance, based upon an internal study of the percentage of successful automobile pursuits by 6-cylinder versus 8-cylinder patrol cars, the city of Los Angeles in 1958 determined that they would use only 8-cylinder cars for patrol while 6-cylinder vehicles were delegated to investigation and transportation (Gourley and Bristow).
[74] “The San Francisco Police Department: 150 Years of History.” S.F.Police.org, http://sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1592 (accessed May 18, 2012).
[75] For a pre-war analysis, see David Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture 1910–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), and for a post-war analysis see Jeremy Packer, Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety, and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
[76] Paul Weston, The Police Traffic Control Function (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1968), 3.
[77] See Jeremy Packer “Rethinking Dependency: New Relations of Transportation and Communication,” in Thinkings with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, eds. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson (New York: Peter Lang 2006), 79–100.
[78] See Weston. Also see Ross D. Petty, “The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Bicycle Policing.” International Police Mountain Bike Association, 2006, http://www.ipmba.org/newsletters/ABriefHistoryofPoliceCycling.pdf (accessed May 2012).
[79] See R. N. Harger, “Some Practical Aspects of Chemical Tests for Intoxication.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 35 (1944): 202–18.
[80] See R. F. Borkenstein and H. W. Smith, “The Breathalyzer and Its Applications.” Medicine, Science, and the Law 2 (1961): 13–22.
[81] Weston 216–21.
[82] Weston 218.
[83] Weston 230.
[84] Responses to the perceived urgency of traffic safety were prolific following the publication of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Danger of the American Automobile (New York: Grossman 1965), and led Congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act.
[85] Weston.
[86] As Bruno Latour has argued, technologies like automatic door closers have agency and elicit specific forms of action from humans.See “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society, ed. W. L. Bijker (London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 225–58.
[87] The German blitzkrieg depended upon cryptographically encoded radio communications. See Friedrich Kittler, “Media Wars: Trenches, Lighting, Stars,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers, 1997), 117–29. Aerial photographs were used to map and plan attacks beginning as early as the Civil War, but gained prominence with film and airplanes during WWI. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1989).
[88] United States Government Accountability Office, “Testimony before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives,” in 9/11 Commission Report: Reorganization, Transformation, and Information Sharing. 2004, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d041033t.pdf, accessed May 20, 2012.
[89] “Department of Justice Information Technology Strategic Plan, 2008–2013.” Justice.gov (2008): 16, http://www.justice.gov/jmd/ocio/2008itplan/08it-strategic-plan.pdf (accessed May 20, 2012).
[90] United States Department of Justice, “Department of Justice IT Strategic Plan Fiscal Years 2010–2015.” Justive.Gov., December 9, 2009, http://www.justice.gov/jmd/ocio/it-strategic-plan.htm (accessed May 19, 2012).
[91] See Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
[92] National Institute of Justice, “Effective Police Communications Systems Require New Governance.” NIJ.org, http://www.nij.gov/topics/technology/communication/governance.htm (accessed May 18, 2012).
[93] Torin Monahan, “The Future of Security? Surveillance Operations at Homeland Security Fusion Centers.” Social Justice 37.2–3 (2010): 84–98.
[94] Torin Monahan and David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 201.
[95] Gary T. Marx, “Soft Surveillance: The Growth of Mandatory Volunteerism in Collecting Personal Information—‘Hey Buddy Can You Spare a DNA?,’” in Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life, ed. Torin Monahan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 37–56.
[96] Kittler 1999.
[97] For an analysis of how such policing came into being, see Richard Erickson and Kevin Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society (University of Toronto Press 1997).
[98] Jack Bratich, “User Generated Discontent: Convergence, Polemology, and Dissent,” Cultural Studies 25.4–5 (2011): 621–40.
[99] Greg Elmer and Andy Opel, Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2008).
[100] Patrick F. Gillham, Bob Edwards, and John A. Noakes, “Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Occupy Wall Street Protests in New York City, 2011.” Policing and Society 23 (2013): 81–102. Also see Jack Bratich, “User-Generated Discontent: Convergence, Polemology, Dissent.” Cultural Studies 25 (2011): 620–39.
[101] “Chicago Police Sound Cannon: LRAD ‘Sonic Weapon’ Purchased Ahead Of NATO Protests,” Huffington Post.com, May 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/chicago-police-sound-cannon-lrad-nato-summit_n_1518322.html (accessed May 19, 2012).
[102] Image taken from Eldridge, Our Rival the Rascal, 321.
[103] From Howard O. Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police, Past and Present (Philadelphia: Howard O. Sprogle, 1887), 275.
[104] Photograph accessed at http://www.tampagov.net/dept_police/information_resources/photo_gallery/historical_photos.asp. Retrieved 5/21/2012.
[105] Photograph accessed at http://mysite.verizon.net/vzesdp09/baltimorepolicehistorybywmhackley2/id26.html. Retrieved 5/12/2012.