Abstract
In “The New Transparency: Police violence in the context of ubiquitous surveillance,” I offered a historical view of transparency, a ubiquitous term and a broadly held normative value in contemporary democracies (Brucato, 2015b). The article explains how video cameras—components of surveillance systems or civilian smart phones—are producing new mediated visibility of policing, the result being exemplary of new developments in transparency (Brucato, 2015a; Brucato, 2015b). In this commentary, I apply my concept of the New Transparency to various efforts to collect, analyze, and report on police use of force. As in the prior article, I elucidate the New Transparency by associating John B. Thompson’s (2005) concept of the new visibility with the political concept of transparency, the latter of which is ideologically and practically rooted in the Enlightenment. Further, I explain how efforts to create databases measuring police violence do similar work to that of civilian video recording of police: the work of adapting an enduring tradition of transparency to the contemporary neoliberal context and to new technological affordances.
Developing an early modern concept
Transparency is an Enlightenment-era concept. The term was first used by Jeremy Bentham, who believed that the persons and objects of that [social] world must be weighed and counted, marked out and identified, subjected to the brightness of the public light, the better to be seen by the public eye. Only then could they be controlled and security made possible….” (Hood, 2006: 8)
Transparency was hoped to reconcile the “vertical inequality” between lawmakers and citizens (Machin, 2012). The normative values for transparency encourage governments and their agents to make themselves visible to their publics via self-disclosure (Birchall, 2011). The powerful establish the legitimacy to hold and wield their power through visibility, exemplifying the Enlightenment project “to make power visible—to illuminate it” (Andersson, 2008: 1). When transparency is lacking, legitimacy declines; in its absence, governments rely on coercion over consent. Without legitimacy, either democracy or governments fail (Brucato, 2015b).
The New Transparency retains early modern qualities but has adapted to the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Formal governance by state organizations and informal governance by communities increasingly depend upon ongoing, dynamic collection and analysis of data (Couldry and Powell, 2014). ICTs not only enable, but also are fundamental to how transparency is produced. Paradoxically, transparency is most often mediated. New surveillance technologies extend the capability for visibility to be unidirectional, to transcend temporal or spatial distances, to be preserved on some medium, to be cataloged and sorted, and for its access to be controlled through institutional or technical protocol. Transparency is produced with documents that permit truthful inferences about reality. In doing so, it borrows the Enlightenment distrust in human subjectivity, while adding new technical affordances to produce seemingly neutral, third-party documentations that are treated as self-evident (Harris, 2011).
Transparency now extends beyond voluntary self-disclosure by state actors aspiring to the Enlightenment ideal. It is now produced through “sousveillance,” or “watching from below,” exemplified by participatory media and data production. Birchall (2011) explains that transparency is being reasserted because trust in governments is failing. Civilian voluntarism steps up especially when government surveillance is considered deficient, negligent, or underfunded. Publics are now active as amateur watchdog journalists and as monitors for environmental and health indices (Kimura and Kinchy, 2016). In “The New Transparency” (Brucato, 2015b), I outlined two varieties of such civilian voluntarism:
Civilians volunteer as a kind of redundancy, when they believe there are gaps in extant data or when they want to quantitatively improve or enhance data quality through repetition. This variety may indicate a lack of trust, for instance if official monitoring is considered remiss or if some perceive information is being withheld. Typical of a neoliberal age of austerity, civilians supplement or replace activity historically under the purview of governments when agencies scale back.
Government self-disclosure of police violence
Police are not immune from the expectation that, as an agency of government, they should publicly disclose their activities. For decades, various attempts have been made to document and report police outcomes (Klinger et al., 2016). Controversial use-of-force incidents are often cause for various publics to declare expectations that investigations be handled transparently and for agencies to improve reporting.
Partly in response to public scrutiny in the wake of the Rodney King beating by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 established a federal mandate for the collection and reporting on use of force by police in the United States. In 1995, the National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) established a research agenda to fulfill this mandate. Although the 1994 law requires federal compilation of data on police shootings, there are no requirements that local police departments provide requisite data. Recently, the BJS found that more than a quarter of killings by police are not recorded in the two federal databases (Schweppe, 2015).
Because local police agencies are not required to collect nationally standardized data, these federal statistical programs are hampered by incomplete and inconsistent data (Klinger, 2012). Localized discrepancies have plagued other national use-of-force monitoring. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collects data about injuries inflicted by police. As an example of their partiality, only 17 states participated in their National Violence Death Reporting System. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintains records of civilians killed by police, but both their Arrest-Related Deaths database and their Supplementary Homicide Reports exclude about half of known deaths (Krieger et al., 2015; Schweppe, 2015). In 2011, FBI spokesperson William Carr claimed the bureau has no mandate to collect information on police use of force, that it would take an act of congress to change that, and that budgetary and practical factors would prohibit police officers and agencies from collecting the data (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2011).
Nongovernmental monitoring of police killings
Perceived failures in government self-disclosure have prompted civilian participation in the production of policing’s transparency (Brucato, 2015b). In the wake of controversial deadly force incidents, citizens have demanded increased self-disclosure by government agencies about investigations and discipline, and for more thorough tracking of use of force. Because government monitoring of killings has proved difficult, tracking the far more frequent use of nonlethal force is treated as infeasible.
Despite past resistance to reporting policing killings, in 2015 FBI Director James Comey said the lack of information provided by his agency is “embarrassing and ridiculous.” Comey says: “It is unacceptable that
Killed By Police started as a Facebook page on 1 May 2013, and posted news articles reporting on any person killed in the United States by a police officer, alongside a running count. Now, Killed By Police also runs a barebones website with a static chronological spreadsheet, each row listing the name of a person killed with a link to a related news article. Where available, the spreadsheet includes the location of the killing and the victim’s age, gender, and race. In 2014, FiveThirtyEight found that 85% of entries in the spreadsheet “were clear-cut police shootings in which the victims were fatally shot by officers acting in the line of duty” and that 8% involved other arrest-related deaths (Fischer-Baum and Johri, 2014). The remaining 7% were accidental deaths caused by officers or intentional killings by officers while off duty.
Hirschfield (2015: 2) discusses what he calls “the most ambitious of [amateur journalist] projects,” Fatal Encounters, which combines data from internet searches, web-based news alerts, public record requests, and crowdsourced information along with “earnest cross-validation.” The site provides a downloadable database of police killings from 2013 to present and includes demographic and geographic information for most incidents. It is maintained by D. Brian Burghart, who says he believes that “in a democracy, citizens should be able to figure out how many people are killed by law enforcement, why they were killed, and whether training and policies can be modified to decrease the number of officer-involved deaths” (Fatal Encounters, n.d.).
Transparency in trouble
The discursive process of defining “missing data” about police violence as a social problem calls upon an enduring value for transparency. Often the references are plain, as when police use-of-force scholar Geoffrey Alpert (2015: 238) explains that “police agencies vary in their transparency concerning OIS [officer-involved shootings].” Transparency consolidates a demand for mechanical objectivity, that objectivity can unproblematically produce knowledge, and that this knowledge enables accountability. Butterfield (2001) implies an enduring distrust of subjectivity and advocacy when claiming the “lack of accurate statistics makes it virtually impossible […] to draw meaningful, big-picture conclusions about deadly encounters between the police and the civilian population.” FBI Director Comey believes “what we need are ideological agnostics who use information to try to solve problems” (Comey, 2015). Alpert (2015: 239) claims that without data “we cannot understand our world and make it better.” Alpert (2015: 239) asks: How can we address concerns about “use of force,” and how can we address concerns about officer-involved shootings if we do not have a reliable grasp on the demographics and circumstances of those incidents? We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze data to see the true nature of what's happening in all of our communities.
Civilian participation in lieu of sufficient government self-disclosure exemplifies contemporary development of the centuries-old value for transparency. These projects share a sense that American police are too frequently using force without sufficient cause. They also share a sense that better methods of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on use-of-force incidents is a necessary early step to fulfill prior to intervention. They too treat the problem of police violence as a knowledge problem. Data is treated as offering some unique access to certain knowledge, without which neither governments nor publics could legitimately act to intervene. Among those in government, academics, journalists, and many activists, police use of force is a social problem to be resolved through better data collection, analysis, and reporting. This discursive maneuver articulates a view of transparency in which databases enable and legitimate social and political action. By implication, this work also functions to communicate that action may be illegitimate without recourse to data.
In “The New Transparency” (Brucato, 2015b), I looked specifically at expectations that video cameras can serve as neutral, objective recorders and reporters of truth. Here, we see that databases are expected to share these qualities. Camera footage turns viewers’ attention to individual occurrences, inviting analysis of “what really happened.” Databases, on the other hand, turn attention toward finding patterns and contrasts. With video, “what really happened” during an individual police killing is an outcome of a certified interpretation of a given video (Brucato, 2015b). The expectation that video will accommodate a lacking condition of transparency encourages viewers to treat cameras as neutral, mechanically objective recorders of truth. In the case of databases, we know that users of data consult them in order to effect change and that this involves not only the presentation of data but also
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
.