Bryce Clayton Newell

Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.

Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras

Police Visibility

Bert-Jaap Koops

Tjerk Timan

Today, public space has become a fruitful venue for surveillance of many kinds. Emerging surveillance technologies used by governments, corporations, and even individual members of the public are reshaping the very nature of physical public space. Especially in urban environments, the ability of individuals to remain private or anonymous is being challenged. Surveillance, Privacy, and Public Space problematizes our traditional understanding of ‘public space’. The chapter authors explore intertwined concepts to develop current privacy theory and frame future scholarly debate on the regulation of surveillance in public spaces. This book also explores alternative understandings of the impacts that modern living and technological progress have on the experience of being in public, as well as the very nature of what public space really is. Representing a range of disciplines and methods, this book provides a broad overview of the changing nature of public space and the complex interactions between emerging forms of surveillance and personal privacy in these public spaces. It will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of academic disciplines, including sociology, surveillance studies, urban studies, philosophy, law, communication and media studies, political science, and criminology.

Surveillance, Privacy and Public Space

This book examines privacy in public space from both legal and regulatory perspectives. With on-going technological innovations such as mobile cameras, WiFi tracking, drones and augmented reality, aspects of citizens’ lives are increasingly vulnerable to intrusion. The contributions describe contemporary challenges to achieving privacy and anonymity in physical public space, at a time when legal protection remains limited compared to ‘private’ space. To address this problem, the book clearly shows why privacy in public space needs defending. Different ways of conceptualizing and shaping such protection are explored, for example through ‘privacy bubbles’, obfuscation and surveillance transparency, as well as revising the assumptions underlying current privacy laws.

Bryce Clayton Newell

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