This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of ‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that inhabitants have little power to secure.

This paper explores the racial dimensions of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) in Canada and the contested politics of seeing that they raise. By drawing on interview data with four Canadian police services and analyzing them through the work of anti-racist and anti-colonialist scholars, we argue that BWCs are engaged in the act of not-seeing the state violence that makes racialized communities vulnerable to police brutality in the first place. To include the politics of not-seeing in the story of BWCs changes our understandings of policing’s new visibility and the potential promise of “policing on camera.”

This paper explores the relevance of a ghost methodology for surveillance studies. Following Torin Monahan’s (2021) call to unsettle transparency as a metric or goal of surveillance studies and inspired by Michelle Brown’s (2022) demand that criminology exorcise the ghosts of white supremacy, I draw upon a 2020 case of a police-involved death of a racialized woman in Toronto to consider the haunting absence of images that are usually called upon to offer evidence what “really” happened. Against the desire to make this death empirically knowable, a ghost method asks us to live with the “eerie” remnants of violence as palpable presences that require of us a reckoning. The spectral presence of white supremacy that looms over the ghostly absence of Regis Korchinski-Paquet can lead us to a form of redress consistent with abolitionist ways of seeing. Thus, I seek to break the impasse of debates over the costs or benefits of increased transparency by outlining how a ghost methodology can help to decentre surveillance studies’ preoccupation with visibility in favour of a more nuanced appreciation of haunting and absence.

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This paper draws on postcolonial temporal analysis to make sense of police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). We argue that the potential of BWCs to make racist policing visible, as originally hoped, is compromised by the inability of "real-time" video to capture the complexity of historical and on-going colonial relations. Drawing on postcolonial literary and visual theory, and especially Homi Bhabha's (2004) postcolonial analysis of "belated-ness" and Andrea Smith's (2015) anti-colonial analysis of "notseeing," we argue that BWCs reproduce a white settler gaze in which the complex histories of colonialism become temporally incommensurate with real-time images of policing social order.