Join the Libraries and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program for a Young Academic Alumni Lecture by Brandon Alston '14!

Join on Zoom here.

Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones—what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Oct 31, 2024 04:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: "Recognizing 'Camera Cues': Policing, Cellphones, and Citizen Countersurveillance" with Brandon Alston '14

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