Watch Groups, Surveillance, and Doing It for Themselves

Abstract

This paper focuses on surveillant relations between citizens and police. We consider how online platforms enable the public to support the task of policing, as well as empowering the public to work without and beyond the police. While community-supported policing interventions are not new, more recently mobile and accessible technologies have promoted and enabled a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture towards policing amongst the public. The paper examines watch groups or those who task themselves with monitoring suspicious or actual behaviours. We consider two empirical examples: first, a community alert group mediated through social media. Second, a group of businesses that circulate, via a website, CCTV images of (alleged) wrongdoing in their premises. Drawing on David Garland’s (1996) work on responsibilisation, we situate the growth of these types of responsibilised groups within the contemporary economic and political climate of crime control in the UK. We argue that citizens are establishing new surveillant relations that are pushing policing in new and evolving directions.

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“…This scholarship has traced the growth of publicprivate intertwining, particularly following Stenning and Shearing's (1979) work on the growth of private security, which concluded that was almost impossible to identify functions or responsibilities of public police that were not in some ways being assumed by private actors. Studies on plural policing (e.g., Jones and Newburn 2006) have underlined the role of private actors in policing while also underlining how private actors are increasingly deputized into public policing apparatus particularly for surveillance functions (Mols and Pridmore 2019;Spiller and L'Hoiry 2019;Wakefield 2004). While earlier iterations of public/private policing research focused on the transfer of services from the public to private sector, our work contributes to research that is focused on the integration of public/private agencies.…”

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