Filming Police
This chapter historicizes and theorizes the work of self-described “cop-watchers,” or police accountability activists based on interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis. This chapter describes the way police accountability organizations are proliferating, thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. The chapter describes the origins of such counternarrative “sousveillance” in the United States. Two women who founded the longest-running cop-watching group in the United States, Berkeley Copwatch, are among the subjects of the research, which spans multiple cities, organizations, and perspectives. The chapter explores the difference between sustained and organized cop-watching and the incidental or spontaneous filming of police, and argues that the true power of cop-watching lies not in its videos but its commitment to community surveillance and witnessing, and that participation in the visual public sphere can be theorized as an essential, democratic, human capability.