Policing as Digital Platform
In this blog post, Kelly Gates traces the impetus for her article “Policing as Digital Platform,” which was recently published in Surveillance & Society.
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I noticed that police body-worn cameras were starting to get media attention in the early 2010s, before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The rise of body-cameras as a visible issue was clearly tied to the increased visibility of police actions, itself tied to the spread of camera-embedded smartphones. But a closer look at this issue made clear that early attention to body cameras was less a response to the demand for more police accountability and more the result of the promotional campaigns of body-camera companies. The appeal that Taser International made to their police customers, for example, was a promise to help the police with their image problem. Police were under siege by people with smartphone cameras at the ready, according to this message, so they needed their own cameras to gain control of the narrative.
Of course, much like smartphone cameras, body-cams were soon being envisioned and designed not simply as video recording devices, but as sensors for generating data about the activities of their users. As Taser pivoted from stun guns to body-cameras, it became clear, to the company if not to everyone else, that the real source of revenue in this business was not going be sales of body-cameras so much as the expanding demands of police media asset management and data analytics. Taser’s primary focus was not the cameras but a back-end, cloud-based evidence management system, branded Evidence.com. The name itself suggested much bigger aspirations than a siloed database of body-cam videos. In fact, what Taser had in mind was a system that would expand to include every piece of evidence from every source, and eventually all forms of police record keeping — in other words, a platform.
Taser [envisioned] a system that would expand to include every piece of evidence from every source, and eventually all forms of police record keeping — in other words, a platform.
Scholars writing about the maturing digital economy soon provided new tools to help make sense of what has been happening in the domain of policing and surveillance infrastructures. Reading Shoshana Zuboff’s recent work, and Nick Srnicek’s book on Platform Capitalism, helped raise and complicate the key question of privatization. The term, while useful as shorthand, seems woefully inadequate as way of capturing the emerging political economy of surveillance and policing. My article in Surveillance & Society is the beginning of an effort to understand the effort to reconfigure the entire system of policing on the model of the platform — a set of developments that remakes policing as a space of activity for new forms of data extraction, while deeply integrating police activities into the platform economy.
