Surveillance: videotape as visual rhetoric

I don't know if anyone else has been following the debate over civilian videotaping of police activity, but some citizens in West Baltimore who have been videotaping police in their neighborhood have been receiving alot of press attention, from the Baltimore Sun to CBS News. Citizens see the video as a form of self-defense from what they consider to be overly aggressive behavior by cops. Disgraced former police chief and current radio talk-show host Ed Norris is so outraged by community counter-surveillance that he actually called on police to respond only to emergency calls, but ignore the corner drug dealers if citizens didn't appreciate police enough to not videotape them.

One thing I thought was interesting is that for the people doing the videotaping, the video provides a vital function in terms of forensic rhetoric, since the ethos of the average black male resident of a large American city is apparently insufficient for complaints of police misconduct to be taken seriously.

Although the official position of the Baltimore City Police Department is that they have no problem with the videotaping--they say they want to know if cops aren't playing by the rules--you can be sure that cops are pissed.

I posted about this in depth on my blog, so I'll just link to that post at the end, since I have video, links to the Sun article, etc. over there. But I wanted to mention something here, since I think the question of video surveillance is an interesting segue to the "image" portion of our seminar. Citizen countersurveillance is a powerful tool, and there's indication that we could see a full-fledged Copwatch program emerge in the coming months.

Turning the cameras back on the cops