7 - Police and the Visual

Summary

Introduction

If prisons are routinely occluded as described in the previous chapter, then police is a power that suffers the opposite condition: the visibility of police is markedly high, with police images occupying a fantastic amount of space across visual culture, a condition that has led police to be described as ‘by far the most visible of all criminal justice institutions’ (Chermak and Weiss 2005: 502). The relation between police and the visual, though, reaches far beyond the binary condition of visibility or invisibility; police power is elementally connected to the visual image, and the moments of interaction between police power and the image are incalculably vast, both historically and in contemporary contexts. In this chapter, I understand police power as largely imagined, expressed, materialized, reified, and resisted through processes that are, at least in part, theatrical, melodramatic, dramatological and, above all, visual.

This is what Jean and John Comaroff (2004) describe as the ‘theatrics of policing’, and it is largely the visual artefacts of those theatrics that I mine in this chapter for insights into the relation between police and the image. Even a fleeting glance, however, at the contemporary visual landscape will quickly overwhelm the attuned viewer with images of and from police; our visual worlds are, it seems, crawling with cops, their fingerprints smudging and distorting nearly every image. This chapter, then, describes only the broad contours of that relation. From ‘Wanted!’ posters and early efforts at biological criminology to the growing corpus of video images of police killings, this chapter describes the development of criminological analysis of the police– image relation and endeavors to uncover some of the myriad ways in which the image and the police always implicate one another.

Images of police

To begin thinking about the relational ties that bind police and the image, we might simply note the vast significance of the camera and other mechanical imaging technologies in the development of police power. This relation has been noted and described in length elsewhere, and at some length elsewhere in this book, and so I simply note, following Jonathan Finn, that the camera’s historical position is as ‘a panoptic technology used in the surveillance of targeted populations and as a tool in a more abstract project of regulating and training an aggregate social body’ (2009: 6).