High-Visibility Policing: Policing on Camera and the Crisis of Police Legitimacy

In 2014 Americans and wider global audiences were transfixed by events in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, eighteen-year-old black man. That shooting, and the ensuing protests, became a significant political issue, wrapped up in the long and troubled history of relations between the police and ethnic minorities in the United States.

The outcry over Brown’s death often focused on the absence of video footage of the confrontation. Commentators questioned why the Ferguson police did not have cameras on their cruisers or on officer Wilson’s uniform, with some seeing this as a conspicuous omission designed to hide the actions of racist police officers.

The public seems to have quickly come to expect that police work will be recorded. This situation challenges a foundational axiom in the sociology of policing. Writing in 1960, Goldstein (1960) characterized policing as a “low-visibility” occupation. He argued that police work is distinctive in part by virtue of how officers at the lowest level of the occupational hierarchy exercise considerable discretion out of sight of supervisors and often only in the immediate presence of a handful of citizens. But technological and social developments are rapidly changing the police’s visible profile, making previously concealed aspects of police work increasingly visible.

A consensus is emerging that the police’s new high-visibility status undermines public trust and challenges police legitimacy. This is a reasonable assumption given the disturbing content of many videos of the police. In this article, however, we interrogate this rapidly evolving situation and question the extent to which videos of the police are producing uniformly negative outcomes for them. We accentuate how the police are involved in an ongoing struggle for legitimacy, played out on a public stage and involving various images, audiences, and interpretations of recorded police behavior. This involves paying attention to the complex and countervailing dynamics of police visibility, empowerment, and legitimacy (Brighenti 2010). We highlight some of these dimensions in part by drawing on our own research on policing in Canada to accentuate the different ways individual line officers relate to their heightened camera visibility.

The police inhabit a continually evolving, visible field that both structures and is structured by power relations. Such visibility is an often contentious personal and organizational accomplishment, one that is simultaneously a tool and a stake in political struggles.

Here “visibility” refers to a dynamic series of concrete social processes that elevate aspects of the world into a visible register. The distinctive visible field of the police involves diverse interpersonal optics, technologies of perception, practices of revelation and concealment, and relational strategies of power. While the police surreptitiously watch—and watch out for—certain categories of people (Marx 1988; Coleman and McCahill 2011), a good deal of their visibility is dyadic. That is, the police watch the public while also being seen by citizens, giving rise to complex personal and organizational projects of impression management (Goffman 1959).

Highly attuned to their public image, the police act out social scripts that structure the expectations of appropriate behavior for both themselves and citizens. Officers try to keep activities that might appear unprofessional in backstage regions, only accessible to trusted insiders. The most controversial of these backstage behaviors are instances of violence, discrimination, or criminality, which would be immediately discrediting. They also encompass more prosaic displays of fear, sadness, dark humor, anger, boredom, or other things that can disrupt dominant understandings of the stereotypically masculine police persona (Martin 1994; Bolton and Feagin 2004).

While much police work remains unseen backstage, the visibility of patrol officers has dramatically increased in recent years, partly due to the introduction of new information and communication technologies, including GPS locators on cars, in-car police computers, and social media profiles. Cameras in particular stand out for how they have transformed the police’s visible profile (Norris and Armstrong 1999; Goold 2003; Manning 2008; Hier 2010). Police officers are increasingly recorded by cameras operated by private businesses, journalists, individual citizens, and their own police organizations. These include cameras on dashboards, in the police station, and now on police uniforms. The police’s camera visibility is further augmented by the public’s ability to easily upload images onto video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Cameras transform the dynamics of police visibility, which were previously characterized by a type of low-profile copresence (Lianos 2012). When recorded, a police officer’s actions are no longer opaque, transitory moments in time, experienced only by the people in the immediate surroundings. Instead, they produce a semipermanent record that can be stored, distributed widely, repeatedly reexamined, slowed down, enhanced, and compared to other recordings (Latour 1986). Consequently, video recordings alter the spatial and temporal dynamics of policing. In the process, cameras produce cascading and somewhat unpredictable changes in interpersonal dynamics and power relations.

The police’s enhanced camera visibility, however, is not simply the result of more footage; other unique aspects of a police officer’s role and place in society are involved. For example, audiences are drawn to images of the police partly because of their elevated symbolic importance (Gusfield and Michalowicz 1984; Manning 2012). As the coercive arm of the state, the police now also stand for authority, justice, and fairness. This presents recurring problems of legitimation, as accounts—and increasingly images—of officers violating their noble pursuits tend to automatically attract critical attention. Indeed, few employees share with the police the possibility that a recording of their actions will prompt mass public unrest and major political crises.

A related dynamic structuring the police’s elevated visible profile is the fraught relationship between the police and certain urban communities. In some locales citizens do not see the police as offering a helping hand, but instead as delivering a ruthless boot to repress marginalized groups (Goffman 2014). In such situations encounters between the public and the police can become a flashpoint for accusations of discrimination and abuse, which occasionally escalate into extreme violence and political unrest. As Fassin (2013, ix) notes, almost all major political uprisings in Western societies in the past half century have been sparked by a confrontation between the police and poor, urban, and often racialized communities.

One final factor that helps elevate the visible profile of the police is how recordings of police actions reproduce dominant media templates (Doyle 2003). While much police work is tedious and profoundly uninteresting (Reiner 2010), it can be punctuated by moments of high drama. When such events are filmed in the gritty cinéma-vérité aesthetic of surveillance footage, the resulting videos have an added level of authenticity that fits seamlessly into the now firmly established genre of reality television.

As state agents empowered to use force to reproduce a social order divided along lines of class, race, and gender, the police are in a constant struggle for legitimacy. It is increasingly in the realm of “the visible” that such “social and political struggles are articulated and carried out” (Thompson 2005, 49). Representations of the police on television, in movies, and on mainstream news are an important part of the dynamics of police legitimacy (Sparks 1992; Mawby 2012). The current proliferation of images of policing derived from surveillance and cell-phone cameras is undeniably altering the police’s visible profile. As we set out below, however, it is not yet clear what this means for police legitimacy.

We are now accustomed to a parade of controversial police videos appearing on assorted media platforms. These range from police being rude all the way to cases in which officers have killed citizens. The iconic example of this situation is George Holliday’s recording of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department beating Rodney King on the side of the highway in 1991. The recording of this shockingly brutal assault inflamed the already tense relations between the LAPD and racialized communities in Los Angeles. It also helped ignite riots in 1992 after the police officers in the video were acquitted for their role in the assault (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Lasley 1994).

Since that landmark recording an escalating number of videos—often now recorded on cell-phone cameras and uploaded onto websites like YouTube.com—have become the focus of political debate and public outcry. Prominent examples include the death of Robert Dziekanski in 2007 after he was filmed being tasered several times by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in the Vancouver airport. Two years later, during G-20 protests in London, England, bystanders recorded the police striking newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson and pushing him to the ground. Tomlinson, who was not involved in the protests, also died soon afterward. Still more recently, New York Police Department officer Eric Pantaleo was recorded placing Eric Garner in a chokehold after he was confronted for selling loose cigarettes. The video shows a close-up of Officer Pantaleo choking Mr. Garner, whose last words, “I can’t breathe,” are captured on film. Like Dziekanski and Tomlinson, Garner died soon afterward.

The proliferation of these and other such videos has given rise to a prominent sense among many commentators that we are witnessing a significant change in power dynamics. Castells (2007, 239) refers to the greater ability to use information technologies to document the activities of established actors as a form of “counter power” (see also Monahan 2006). Academics and public commentators now routinely suggest that controversial videos of the police challenge police legitimacy and undermine public trust (Friedersdorf 2014; St. Fleur 2014; Gordon 2014; Siegel 2014). At the same time, however, the increased presence of cameras is seen as presenting an opportunity to “reverse the gaze” of the police, to “watch the watchers,” and in so doing curtail police misconduct and rein in the arbitrary use of power. There is a sense among a wide array of commentators that by publicizing instances of police abuse to a wider audience, the police will be pressured toward greater professionalism and accountability.

The most vocal and perhaps most assertive version of this view is articulated by activist groups like CopWatch. Founded in Berkeley in the 1990s, CopWatch now comprises a loose network of groups in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia who encourage citizens to use portable cameras to record police activity. They also create online databases to house videos of controversial police conduct. According to the website of the Berkeley CopWatch, recording police officers is a crucial first step in empowering communities to resist police abuses of power. Comparable organizations, such as Photography Is Not A Crime (PINAC), produce online spaces at which footage of police can be archived in hopes of raising public awareness of police misconduct and encouraging political action.

More established and mainstream activist organizations also echo these sentiments. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union—which historically has focused on the privacy risks of surveillance devices and practices—has characterized cameras as a “critical check and balance” in the context of policing.¹ It has gone so far as to help create and promote technologies designed to allow citizens to record interactions with the police.²

Segments of the popular media also reiterate the sense that by exposing what were previously overlooked or concealed police abuses, cameras present a serious challenge for the police (Madrigal 2011; Friedersdorf 2014; Friedman 2014; Meyer 2014). Here again the presence of more cameras is understood as a way to eliminate confusion about police actions, reduce abuses of power, and curtail the use of force (Harris 2010; Thompson 2014). This position has also been advanced by some scholarly commentators, such as Hans Toch (2012), who argues that such recordings raise awareness of police behavior, which in turn can encourage scrutiny, criticism, political action, and ultimately progressive changes in policing (see also Potere 2012).

Hence, in a variety of arenas one repeatedly encounters the claim that cameras both prompt a crisis of police legitimacy and also create opportunities to police the police. Some evidence for the fact that the police find this greater camera scrutiny challenging can be found in cases in which officers have used a series of ad hoc efforts to try to control when and how they are recorded. Included here are instances when officers have pressured citizens to surrender their cameras or have confiscated and destroyed cameras. Officers at public protests, wearing opaque face shields, have removed their name tags and placed black tape over their badge numbers to ensure they cannot be individually identified on film. In a recent Canadian case the police charged citizens with obstructing justice for filming them. Such efforts have led Simon (2012) to suggest that the security establishment is conducting a “war on cameras” designed to maintain a dominant state-centric view of policing and security (see also Wall and Linnemann 2014).

To what extent does this ostensible camera-generated crisis actually permeate policing on the ground? Our research on police attitudes toward cameras suggests that the crisis narrative is overstated and undernuanced. While cameras are undeniably altering the police’s visible field, the consequences of this change are complicated, somewhat contradictory, and rather uncertain. The police have complex relationships with cameras and are finding ways to adapt to being on camera that require politicians, activists, and academics to move beyond the overly simple claim that more cameras present a crisis for the police and enhance the opportunities for greater police accountability.

A useful way to assess the impact of cameras on policing is to simply spend time with officers working in camera-intensive environments to see how they behave. That is what we did from August to December 2013. We conducted more than two hundred hours of in-field observations with three Canadian police organizations, discussing these issues with approximately sixty officers, both male and female. We studied an urban police force, campus security for a major university, and the transit police responsible for securing a large urban transportation system. All participants had extensive experience of policing on camera, although they were subjected to different configurations of camera visibility. The transportation officers, for example, spent almost their entire shifts watched by cameras operated by the transportation authority. The campus security officers, in contrast, worked in an environment containing comparatively few fixed cameras. All officers regularly encountered citizens carrying smartphones.

Our street-level observations and discussions were supplemented by twenty semistructured interviews. The vast majority of participants were white males, ranging in age from their midtwenties to early fifties. We spoke with only twelve female officers (all white) and only five nonwhite officers. This racial/gender breakdown roughly resembles the profile of the police organizations we studied, which still tend to be dominated by white men. We closely accompanied police officers and observed interactions with the public, including casual encounters, cautions, fines, arrests, and the use of force. We did not observe any notable differences in the substance or frequency of how these interactions were articulated by officers working for the three different police organizations we studied.

As we detail below, our findings suggest that officers are not uniformly or consistently disturbed by the presence of cameras, as one might expect if cameras were creating a crisis of legitimacy for the police. Instead, officers have nuanced relationships to cameras, sometimes fearing them, occasionally embracing them, and often simply seeing them as a banal and inevitable part of contemporary life. We characterize these orientations as “camera shy,” “habituated” and “strategic advantage” and outline them in greater detail below. We characterize these as “orientations,”not “opinions,” because opinions are relatively stable sets of beliefs held by an individual. In contrast, an orientation is a way to conceptualize a phenomenon or situation that an officer might align with in different contexts and with varying degrees of conviction. This is a crucial distinction, because officers tend to move back and forth between orientations depending on the context and the specifics being discussed. So, while we occasionally refer to an officer as being “camera shy” or “habituated,” this is simply shorthand and is not meant to suggest it was a permanent or stable characteristic of an individual officer’s worldview.

“Camera shy” officers are anxious and annoyed about being filmed on the job. These officers believe that most people who record police work are looking for any opportunity to broadcast critical or unflattering images of the police. Cameras make these officers more conscious of prospective audiences far removed from the events on the ground. They therefore give greater consideration to how their actions might look to unsympathetic viewers. Rather than seeing this as enhancing police professionalism, “camera shy” officers tended to see this as a form of “political correctness” that limits their ability to do their job safely and effectively, which sometimes involves needing to handle aggressive, inebriated, or just generally difficult people in a direct and assertive fashion. As one officer put it, “I miss the time when I could just tell someone being a jerk to fuck off!” Such an uncensored approach has become more difficult because of how it might look and sound if broadcast widely.

Police trainers have responded to this situation by teaching cadets to become more “camera friendly.” Instructors advise officers that rather than barking “spread ’em” before searching a suspect, they should give detailed and genteel instructions, like “spread your feet so an officer can search your pockets.” Officers are instructed to use loud and exaggerated speech when addressing the public that can be captured on any audio recording:

I’ve been told before in training “you’re always on stage, you’re always on stage” and to act that way, like you’re being recorded and everything. And what I mean is, I personally notice, I repeat myself a lot more, I’m louder with my directions, like making it very, very clear that I’ve told this person many times.

Officers also worry that cameras can make them think twice in situations when almost instinctual responses are needed. As one officer put it: “What I don’t like about it is there is a potential for hesitation there, because of the worry of the camera, and that hesitation, in the right circumstances, could be deadly.” Officers believe they need to immediately react to the on-the-ground realities of any situation. Cameras can make them hesitate to use the appropriate level of force required to protect themselves and bystanders, because they fear the potential consequences of having that violence be captured on video.

Citizens with cameras also present more immediate dangers. Bystanders sometimes interpret someone filming the police as a provocation, which can escalate an already tense situation. The more dramatic dangers presented by cameras became apparent in 2014, when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed a soldier standing guard at Ottawa’s war memorial, then proceeded to attack the Centre Block of Canada’s parliament buildings. As the police tried to identify the victim, the number of gunmen, and where they were located, they also had to go on social media to beg citizens to stop posting pictures of security personnel on Twitter, as those images put officers in extreme danger by revealing their locations.

“Camera shy” officers were also anxious about the accuracy of recordings. Several questioned whether videos recorded by citizens could be trusted. Officers who articulated this orientation were attuned to how a series of malleable factors, including camera angles, audio, focus, run time, lighting, voice-overs, titles, selective edits, camera positioning, and the written narrative summarizing the video, can shape how audiences interpret the veracity of a recording. Such officers also accentuated the polysemic nature of policing images, recognizing how different audiences have starkly different interpretations of the same video (Goodwin 1994). This was typically articulated as a fear that images would be “taken out of context.”

The “camera shy” officers complained that videos filmed by citizens usually begin at the flashpoint of confrontation. Such recordings can consequently miss vital preceding events. Included here would be any initial confrontational or violent acts by the suspect and the techniques officers used to initially handle the situation, such as warnings and de-escalation strategies. Such omissions leave audiences with the impression that an officer became violent without provocation or without first trying to handle the situation diplomatically.

Relatedly, “camera shy” officers regularly complain that the public does not understand the rules the police are expected to follow, particularly in relation to the use of force. Officers regularly pointed to news reports, political activists’ claims, and the comments on YouTube videos as evidence of how little citizens understand the processes and legalities surrounding the use of force, and more specifically, how the public fails to consider officer health and safety when interpreting such recordings. As one officer put it: “[A] lot of the public is blind to what we actually deal with and how we’re trained to deal with certain situations, and they are quick to judge, very quick to judge, and they don’t know.”

For many “camera shy” officers, the essence of policing involves split-second decisions. Viewers who judge police work on the basis of a meticulous and retrospective scrutiny of videos are being profoundly unfair, because such recordings miss the immediate, chaotic, and occasionally high-risk nature of police work. As one officer put it: “You can’t capture all the emotions, the things going on with a video, the things that really create concern, panic, and anxiety. So to sit there and criticize someone else based on a video, and say ‘I would do different,’ that’s just unfair.” Consequently officers often simply dismiss the criticisms of citizens who judge police actions based on watching video footage.

Officers also worry about more direct forms of manipulation and the potential for videos to misrepresent officers and spread false information about policing (Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006; Singer and Ashman 2009). They find such videos immediately suspect because the recordings do not conform to the types of evidentiary standards the police are accustomed to working with. In their minds, this procedural deficit raises the prospect of citizens’ consciously manipulating the recordings.

In sum, officers occasionally fear the presence of cameras. Importantly, these fears are not related to a belief that the cameras will reveal their violent, racist, and criminal acts. Instead, officers accentuate how videos can increase the day-to-day dangers of policing, while displaying their actions to often biased audiences who are largely ignorant about the rules and occupational realities that structure police actions. The anxieties articulated by such officers correspond most closely to the “crisis narrative” about how cameras are changing police work, but this was not the sole or even the most frequent view our police respondents articulated about their relationship to cameras.

It is commonly assumed that police officers are “camera shy” (MacDonald, Hughes, and Dodds 2012, 1; Wall and Linnemann 2014), routinely seeking to avoid being recorded. Our research, in contrast, points to something quite different. While officers sometimes prefer not to be filmed—and there are occasional instances of officers trying to destroy or confiscate cameras—the reality is that cameras have so quickly become part of urban policing that they are almost inescapable. Rather than going about their shift strategizing on a moment-by-moment basis about how to avoid being recorded—something that is increasingly impossible—most officers have instead simply learned to live with, and sometimes capitalize on, the reality of policing on camera, as we outline here and in the next section.

People routinely watch uniformed police. While officers told us this scrutiny often made them self-conscious when they were rookies, they grew accustomed to the attention, to the point that it is “not something to be concerned with.” Cameras, for them, are just an extension of the interpersonal stares they routinely receive, and as such they are “unfazed” by them. This reinforces the point made by Goold and his colleagues that “CCTV cameras have disappeared into the background of urban life and become socially invisible” (Goold, Loader, and Thumala 2013, 9). Public surveillance cameras, in particular, were barely noticed by the police, but the indifference of these “habituated” officers also extends to recordings captured by citizens’ handheld cameras, cameras operated by the police, and cameras at private businesses. Officers acknowledge the slim chance that they could be recorded doing something that unsympathetic audiences would criticize, and that such images could “go viral.” But on a day-to-day basis, officers do not see evidence that the cameras will produce sensational career-destroying videos of themselves or their departmental colleagues. Such an outcome was perceived as so unlikely as to be almost random, and as such not something to worry about. An officer summarizes this view:

I think a lot of them look at it and they think “It’ll never happen to me” and they do their job not focusing on the potential for that type of information to go out. I do think that some will try to ignore it too, as far as thinking that it’s just part of life and there is no need to think about it.

We could fill this article with quotes presenting variations on this theme, but there are only so many ways one can say: “I don’t care about cameras” or “I never think about them.” Such lack of concern was readily apparent in our field observations.

How can we explain this indifference, given the regular assertions that cameras are undermining police legitimacy? The answer lies in the different assumptions about the realities of police work held by critics of police and individual police officers. Where critics tend to assume that recording the police will reveal a backstage world of rampant police malpractice, individual officers believe that they and their colleagues generally follow the rules, and that the cameras would only rarely capture anything sensational or salacious. While officers acknowledge there are a few “rotten apples” on any force and prefer to keep some things backstage—most particularly dark humor and candid assessments of people and situations—they do not see themselves as corrupt, violent, or unprofessional people who need to hide their actions. Cameras are not a problem for them, because they believe they routinely follow their training and comply with legal and professional standards:

Well, personally, you just have to act according to the job, to the powers and laws that you enforce. And you have to act according to the subject’s behavior. So if you act according to all those things and you take into account all the, all the mitigating factors, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

“Habituated” officers believe most fair-minded citizens would not object to how officers perform their duties and acknowledge that the vast majority of police work would be boring to watch. Those citizens who might interpret police actions as inappropriate or abusive are characterized as irredeemably antipolice, and as such not worth trying to appease.

“Camera shy” and “habituated” officers therefore have different views on the verisimilitude of camera evidence. Where the “camera shy” orientation focuses on the constructed and potentially manipulated nature of images, “habituated” officers tend to approach videos as providing a mirror of reality that, when explained to unbiased audiences, will ultimately support an officer’s interpretation of a situation and exonerate him or her from accusations of wrongdoing.

We characterize the third and final orientation as “strategic advantage” because it accentuates the benefits cameras can provide the police. When articulating this view, officers tended to focus on cameras operated by businesses or the police, but also sometimes saw value in being recorded by citizen-operated cameras. Cameras, for them, can be empowering because they create opportunities to gather evidence, challenge false accusations, manage interpersonal encounters, and produce preferred representations of situations. These officers also tend to have a realist perspective on the verisimilitude of camera evidence, again bracketing off the concerns articulated in the “camera shy” orientation about how images are malleable and open to multiple interpretations.

First, officers like cameras because they expect the footage will help in their investigations. Toward that end, we often saw officers use their personal smartphones to take pictures of license plates and crime scenes and take impromptu mug shots. Officers also asked bystanders who had video recorded incidents to email them images that might help identify or locate a criminal suspect.

Cameras were particularly appealing because of how they preempt unfair criticism. As many officers put it, cameras help “cover my ass.” Here the camera’s ostensibly objective qualities can refute unfair depictions and “bogus” complaints about police actions. This concern about false accusations was a constant point of reference. Officers liked being surrounded by cameras, because the recordings can quickly contradict a complainant’s false accusations. Officers see the risks of being falsely accused or acting inappropriately as far exceeding the remote possibility that they will be filmed doing something inappropriate or illegal. This incessant concern about false accusations goes a long way toward explaining why officers find cameras appealing.

Cameras can also give the police a positional advantage in encounters with citizens. Such an advantage flows from several distinct factors. The police are usually more attuned to the existence and location of cameras and have greater ability to draw upon such footage. Their formal and informal relations with many camera operators also mean officers have more realistic opportunities to access and use those images, should they want to do so, than ordinary citizens. Some camera systems put the police in real-time communication with camera operators, allowing them to ask the operator to “watch my back” and call for assistance if needed.

Officers also sometimes strategically point out cameras to citizens. For example, officers will inform a suspect during an informal interrogation that he is being recorded, implying that his lies will be exposed. Officers also remind irate people about the cameras in hopes of deterring a violent confrontation, something we saw officers do several times (see also Goold 2003). Several officers conspicuously positioned themselves in direct sight of a camera when facing significant risks, with one officer noting she was simply “more comfortable” being recorded. As another officer observed: “When there is a fight, I want it to be on camera.”

Cell-phone cameras operated by citizens sometimes work the same way. As one officer put it in reference to citizen-recorded footage, if someone challenges her behavior, she can always say “check the tape.” In one instance we saw a citizen who had recorded an arrest inform the arresting officer that he would share the recording with him, in case anyone accused him of using excessive force. So officers in the strategic advantage position share with their “indifferent” colleagues the sense that they do not need to hide their actions from the cameras. Those who focus on the advantages provided by cameras are simply far more enthusiastic in their assessment of how cameras help document meritorious police work and refute inaccurate or fraudulent accounts. As one officer put it: “I use being recorded as like having an extra witness on my side … with cameras and stuff like that, its just one extra person that’s going to be like ‘yeah, you were doing your job 100 percent right.’”

Sometimes officers consciously try to shape how citizens and officials interpret ambiguous situations. For example, officers often noted that citizens can have a hard time making sense of violent incidents, which can be messy and chaotic as compared to the stylized violence citizens are accustomed to seeing on television and in the movies. Consequently, as an encounter unfolds officers try to impose their own sets of meanings on the event for the benefit of any eventual viewers of the camera footage:

There are times where maybe if I could use it as a way to explain myself to people … like if I was in a situation where someone was resisting arrest, I would tell them “stop resisting arrest” “ stop resisting” and have like verbal cues, because if it was being video and audio recorded, people would watch and be like “oh yeah he gave that person verbal command” [and it] showed that your actions were consistent with your training …. It could help you in court for sure.

In this way the cameras allow officers to place their own interpretive stamp on ambiguous or potentially discrediting situations.

In sum, these different orientations provide an important counterpoint to the prevalent view that cameras seriously challenge police legitimacy. Officers are certainly sometimes annoyed by the cameras, but typically not because they want to hide their misdeeds. Instead, they believe cameras complicate the process of policing on the ground and produce images that can (incorrectly) be interpreted as racist or excessively violent. But by far the most common orientation to the cameras is simple indifference, treating them as an inescapable reality of contemporary policing. As cameras become more pervasive, officers are also coming to recognize their diverse benefits, with some seeing cameras as indispensable tools they would not want to do without.

Consequently, our data do not suggest that the police are involved in a concerted “war on cameras.” While the media point to isolated instances of the police confiscating or destroying cameras, the claim that the police are systematically acting “as street level censors fashioning an authorized way of seeing and knowing, limiting or eliminating that which might embarrass or enrage the state” (Wall and Linnemann 2014, 139) is overstated. Even if they wanted to do so, it is simply not feasible for the police to routinely censor cameras, given the sheer number of lenses now trained on them during a shift. Indeed, trying to engage in such censorship would likely result in even more inflammatory images of officers confiscating or destroying cameras.

By focusing almost exclusively on the prospect that cameras are creating a crisis in policing, we can lose sight of the full range of police behavior now being recorded and publicized. If we expand our gaze just slightly, a more complicated picture of the relationship between cameras and policing quickly emerges. Consider, for example, the “crediting images” of the police. Such videos involve “real-life” policing captured on camera and also have a cinéma-vérité “reality” aesthetic. But rather than portraying abuses of power and shameful behavior, crediting images depict the police more favorably.

Crediting images of the police tend to fall into at least five recurrent genres. The first is humor and depicts officers lip-syncing, riding skateboards, breakdancing, and generally acting out of character. The second genre displays officers acting kindly and includes videos of them helping trapped or injured animals, tying the shoes of homeless people, and the now iconic photo of Boston police officer John Bradley carrying jugs of milk to a family locked down after the Boston Marathon bombing. The third genre depicts police heroism, including high-speed pursuits, dramatic rescues, and shootouts with murderers. Sometimes heroism shades into the fourth genre, “tragedy,” which includes officers being shot or run over on the side of a highway. One of the most prominent of these tragedy/kindness videos shows Jeremy Henwood of the San Diego police department buying cookies for a thirteen-year-old boy at a McDonald’s. Viewers are informed that a suicidal gunman killed Henwood immediately after he left the restaurant.

The final genre of police-crediting videos shows police acting professionally and includes videos of officers respectfully doing their jobs or showing admirable restraint as they are verbally abused or physically assaulted. One of the more notable of these professionalism videos is entitled “Honest Cops.” It depicts a police officer in the Canadian city of Hamilton as he forcefully arrests a struggling and screaming young woman while the videographer comments that the officer is being too aggressive. This familiar script shifts dramatically when the officer then approaches the crowd of bystanders and begins to calmly, respectfully, and somewhat apologetically explain why he had no choice but to use force in this situation.

Discrediting images of the police are often the stuff of hard news and political controversy. In contrast, crediting images tend to be fluff pieces in mainstream or local news, stories on daytime talk shows, or videos on someone’s Twitter feed. Notwithstanding these different routes to audiences, crediting images of the police can be remarkably popular. For example, the “Honest Cops” video has had more than two million views. Thousands of citizens who watched this video sent supportive emails to the Hamilton police department. The Ontario ombudsman tweeted the video, commending the Hamilton police for doing an excellent job. A humorous video of police officers lip-syncing Katy Perry’s song “Dark Horse” has also received more than two million views on YouTube, and it was featured on popular websites like Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Time magazine’s official site. The video “Final Act of Kindness,” which shows officer Henwood buying cookies for the young boy, is also immensely popular. A YouTube version of the NBC news report on the incident has had more than six million views. A search on YouTube for “Henwood” brings up several “highlight” and “tribute” videos that set images of Henwood, his peers, and his family to soft music. The incident even inspired a documentary entitled Heroes Behind the Badge, which accentuates the dangers of police work.

Such videos appeal to quite different audiences, as we emphasize below. Some audiences are simply drawn to the drama of police recordings. For example, in his ethnographic research on policing in France, Fassin (2013, 60) noted: “If they [the police] had anything in common with the teenagers from the projects, it was their fascination with Internet sites dedicated to amateur films of police chases.” Some officers we spoke with regularly search Google for citizen-recorded videos containing images of themselves for the simple voyeuristic thrill of seeing themselves online.

While crediting images may never have the political gravitas of police-discrediting images, they are nonetheless a recurrent and often prominent part of the overall field of police visibility, amounting to a form of policing-centric countervisibility. Videos showing police rescuing puppies, helping the homeless, or being killed on duty also help shape the public’s perception of policing and are part of an ongoing mediated struggle over police legitimacy played out in popular culture. Different audiences will have starkly contrasting orientations to these depictions.

The struggle over police legitimacy as it pertains to the police’s continually escalating camera visibility will not likely revolve around sustained attempts to break cameras, confiscate videos, or intimidate videographers. Instead, it will be played out in how the proliferating number of crediting and discrediting images of the police are accessed and interpreted by different audiences.

Before they view any particular video, citizens often already have strong beliefs about the police. Such preexisting attitudes predispose individuals to interpret videos in ways that either support or criticize the police. In a society such as the United States, for example, these views tend to be strongly divided along racial and class lines.

At the most basic level, privileged white people tend to be more habitually supportive of the police than are poorer racialized groups. Public opinion polls have long suggested that race informs public support, trust, and confidence in policing in the United States (Drake 2014; McCarthy 2014; Newport 2014). While whites are supportive, nonwhites and especially blacks are consistently more critical. A poll in June 2014, for example, showed that 59 percent of whites expressed “a great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in police, compared to 37 percent of blacks.³ In the same poll only 12 percent of whites expressed “no trust” in police, compared to 25 percent of blacks. Such attitudes are often grounded in the starkly different ways these populations are and have been policed.

Racial/class differences in police support are vital for understanding the broader political implications of both crediting and discrediting police videos. Videos of police behavior, like all images, are open to different interpretations. This fact was most dramatically demonstrated in the Rodney King case, in which the lawyers for the police focused their defense on an intensive, frame-by-frame scrutiny of a massively enlarged display of the recorded police beating. By slowing down the video and offering an assessment of what was depicted on each frame, informed by a police-centric interpretation of Mr. King’s actions, the officers’ assumptions, and the rules governing the police’s use of force, the lawyers were able to convince the jury that the officers’ behaviors were justified (Goodwin 1994).

Indeed, the Rodney King case starkly demonstrated that there are no “self-evident” images of police abuse; all such videos are open to interpretation. A video that might seem to one audience an unmistakable example of excessive force can look entirely different to an audience comprising people from a different racial or class background.

As crediting and discrediting images of police behavior proliferate, it is possible that rather than making all citizens more critical of the police, the videos will instead tend to confirm and reinforce people’s existing inclinations or only minimally alter their perceptions. This tendency is also fostered by a media environment in which viewers are increasingly fed online news and entertainment through algorithms that use prior viewing patterns to deliver content that reproduces and strengthens a person’s existing worldview (Sustein 2001). People with a history of watching discrediting police videos will therefore be automatically exposed to more videos of police corruption and violence, while those who prefer to watch crediting police videos will be disproportionately fed more images of police officers acting kind, heroic, and professional.

Our analysis points to several factors that complicate the now common assumption that the online proliferation of discrediting images is creating a crisis for the police. First, it is clear that police officers do not uniformly share this sense of crisis and often see diverse benefits from being recorded. Second, the cameras are producing not only discrediting police videos, but also crediting police videos, which are immensely popular with some audiences. Third, in a society divided along racial and class lines, different groups are predisposed toward trusting or not trusting the police. Such inclinations shape what videos different audiences watch and how they interpret what they see.

Controversial police videos can depict the types of police behaviors that marginalized groups have long complained about (Fiske 1998), but which privileged audiences might be observing for the first time. While we must strive to eliminate police violence and abuse, at a more analytical level we must also recognize that the police are tasked with doing often-unpleasant-looking things. These responsibilities are not going to disappear. Officers will continue to round up desperate immigrants; constrain uncooperative individuals; “deal with” the poor, mentally ill, and addicted; disperse protesters who refuse to relocate; and focus disproportionate attention on the actions of marginalized individuals whom privileged groups tend to see as “suspicious” or “threatening.” The prevalence of cameras ensures that we will see and hear more of such actions.

It remains to be determined which audiences will tend to watch what types of videos, and what they will actually perceive when they watch them. Rather than creating a crisis in policing that results in meaningful political or organizational change, it might be that the privileged groups who are in the best position to press for police reform will instead orient themselves to crediting images, while turning a blind eye to videos of discrediting police behavior; implicitly dismissing the representativeness of such depictions or accepting such actions as the bearable cost of policing the boundary separating them from encounters with marginalized, racialized, and criminalized others.

The sense of shock that can accompany viewing the increasing number of discrediting police videos may turn out to be simply a function of the relative novelty of such images. In time, an unrelenting stream of police videos may dull the sensibilities of key audience segments, as police behaviors that were previously extremely localized become a routine part of our mediascape.