Police Emergency Services: How civic vigilance is mobilized, controlled, and sometimes limited
In this post, Philipp Knopp reflects on his piece ‘Staying in the Game: Activation, Vigilance, and Normalization of Emergency Calls in Austria’, which appeared in the 21(4) issue of Surveillance & Society.
When we think of surveillance, our attention in recent years has focused on Artificial Intelligence and new digital security devices. We have somewhat forgotten to think of the traditional police practices of surveillance. In my recent article in Surveillance & Society, I go back to these old-fashioned surveillance tools to unravel paradigmatic shifts in police emergency response in the Alpine republic of Austria.
Emergency services are often intuitively associated with evident danger and urgency. However, in recent policing paradigms, it is reconfigured as a policing tool to activate the population for the “shared task” of security. Activation has long been a concern in critical police and surveillance studies. It means that security responsibilities are increasingly handed over to citizens. The paradox of activation as a technique of governing crime is that the ‘voluntary’ activity of the liberal citizen-subject is guided by powerful actors such as the state, the media, or companies and that these actors claim to have the last say about what is dangerous, what it is to be watched, and what is to be done.
Emergency services in Austria have always been involved in this game of mobilization and control of civil vigilance. Their principal function is not so much to respond to urgencies but more generally to connect the population with police to control civil vigilance and bind it to the sovereign power of intervention. With recent developments in policing, the analysis of Austrian mass media discourse reveals five major transformations that openly contradict our first intuition of what police emergency services are about. Interventions become preemptive. The actual emergency event becomes part of a calculated efficiency-oriented reorganization of emergency services police forces.
Handing over security tasks to citizens has significant consequences. Now, it is the individual citizen who, first and foremost, decides what is to be deemed a criminal and dangerous act. The awareness of citizens is therefore called for, focused, and guided by a plethora of actors. While this is nothing new to surveillance studies, recent crises reveal that the vigilant practice of citizens watching over one another is also controlled and limited on some occasions. The large-scale crises of recent decades, like the Covid-19 pandemic, crises of migration systems, and other rapid transformations of society, produce deep uncertainty.
In Austria, these crises have also led to hypervigilance. The analysis, therefore, reveals that we have to focus on the mobilization of vigilance and how police and media draw boundaries to vigilance and try to limit vigilance related to social issues. The instances of control and limitation highlight that the relation of vigilance is far from submitting itself consensually to police but often conflictual and may even become a threat to power constellations in which police claim the “right to have the last say”, as Jan-Philipp Reemtsma terms it, about what is threat and insecurity.
