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 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.