Crowd surveillance: The (in)securitization of the urban body

Abstract

In the wake of the recent proliferation of the securitization of crowded places, there has been a growth in the development of technologies of crowd behaviour analysis. However, despite the emerging prominence of crowd surveillance in contemporary emergency planning, little has been discussed about its impacts on our understanding of security and surveillance. Drawing from the case of crowd surveillance in Tokyo, this article examines the ways in which crowds are simulated, monitored, and secured through the technology of crowd behaviour analysis, and discusses its implications to the politics of security. It argues that crowd surveillance constitutes a unique form of the biopolitics of security that targets, not the individual body or the social body of population, but the urban body of crowd. The power of normalization in crowd surveillance operates in a preemptive manner through the codification of crowd behaviours that is spatially and temporarily specific. The article also critically interrogates the introduction of crowd surveillance in relation to racialized logics of suspicion and argues that, despite its appearance as a non-discriminatory and 'aracial' technology, crowd surveillance entail the racial coding of crowd behaviour and urban space. The article concludes with the introduction of crowd surveillance as a technology of border control, which reorients existing modalities of (in)securitization at airports.

Ramming attacks, pedestrians, and the securitization of streets and urban public space: a case study of New York City

“…Additionally, newer technologies of crowd surveillance have recently emerged. Nishiyama ( 2018 ) explores some of the commercially available crowd surveillance technologies, such as the one developed by NEC Corporation, and its deployment in Tokyo. They highlight the growth in the development of practices aimed at crowd management to protect people in crowded urban environments.…”

“…They highlight the growth in the development of practices aimed at crowd management to protect people in crowded urban environments. They outline the underlying basis of monitoring density and flow of crowd movements in specific places at specific times to define both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ crowd behavior, where the crowd is symbolic of the urban life that needs to be secured (Nishiyama 2018 ). They also situate this technology within the contemporary global trend of using algorithms to calculate uncertainty which is defined by many scholars as being intangible (Beck 2002 ; Little 2004 ; Marcuse 2006 ).…”

The logistics of police power: Armored vehicles, colonial boomerangs, and strategies of circulation

“…The crowd contains a moment of democratic promise. The crowd has a specific relation to urban space, referring to “the urban body in motion” (Nishiyama, 2018: 202). Crowds are not unique to the city, but their formation is integral to describing those moments of gathering in urban space.…”

“…They are not yet populations, being both smaller in scale and existing more briefly in time than a population. The movement of a crowd, and indeed the crowd itself, is often described in terms of a flow, “formed and deformed at any moment, in different sites, while changing their components all the time” (Nishiyama, 2018: 205). In his defining work on the subject, Canetti (1984) finds in the dynamics of the crowd a unique answer to the question of navigating physical and social distance.…”

Public relations: Theorizing the contestation of security technology

“…But the kind of security enacted through these assemblages is itself dispersed. Networked technology allows for a diffusion on a practical level by making it possible, for example, to collect data on a large scale, monitor objects via radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips or implement crowd surveillance (Bauman et al, 2014;Nishiyama, 2018).…”