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This chapter demonstrates that while in most late modern societies there is a neoliberal hegemony to expand police Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance for crime control and antiterrorism, in Greece there is serious controversy and resistance against the post-Olympic use of more than 1,200 Olympic CCTV cameras. Drawing on the interesting politics of CCTV expansion and resistance, the chapter traces the reasons why, in the Greek context, this very expensive Olympic surveillance “dowry” has been opposed, even for traffic control. It critically attributes Greek citizens’ fear and mistrust primarily to their past police-state experience of authoritarian, thought-control surveillance.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of perception of police use of surveillance cameras (POP-S), perception of police legitimacy (POP-L) and community well-being. The study further explores the mediating effect of procedural justice between POP-S and police legitimacy.

A convenience sampling technique was used in the selection of 388 participants, who answered questions relating to police use of surveillance cameras, legitimacy, procedural justice and community well-being. Structural equation modeling was used to test the effects of the hypothesized paths.

The findings showed that POP-L was positively related to community well-being. In addition, procedural fairness partially mediates between POP-S and police legitimacy.

The study sample was limited to only motorists within the city of Accra. Hence, the study does not consider other potential offenses that may be uncovered by police-deployed surveillance cameras.

The study optimizes the relevance of technology use in contemporary policing for the elimination of road traffic carnage.

In this research, the academic scope of technology-based policing was scholarly advanced by drawing links between police use of surveillance cameras, police legitimacy, procedural justice and community well-being within the context of emerging economies.

As political interfaces, national borders are subject to extensive surveillance and policing within the interstate system. But what happens when the state's gatekeepers emerge from within the social body? How do such instances impact scholarly understandings of governance and surveillance? This chapter investigates these questions empirically, analyzing the Minuteman Project, a grassroots vigilante movement dedicated to directly policing the nation's borders. Situating the movement within the existing literature on “governmentality” and “community policing”, I analyze its history, ideology, practices and interactions with authorities, arguing that, despite their status as non-state actors, its members appropriate, enforce and extend many of the principles of governance and statecraft; whether, surveillance, policing, security or territoriality. Like community policing, the Minutemen highlight the pervasive and decentralized nature of government, social control and surveillance. In occupying and monitoring the border, the group serves as the state's “eyes and ears” without impinging upon its juridical or coercive capacities. However, in contrast to community policing, the Minutemen are not an instance of the state or police engaging or reaching down into the public, but represent a distinct segment of the public reaching up and aligning itself with the “arms” of the state.

Police officers from a police force in Australia were interviewed about the types and level of surveillance they experience in their work, with the recognition of technology contributing to an increased level of such. The concept of the Panopticon and the Looking-Glass Self offer useful frameworks for understanding the experiences of those police officers interviewed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on 14 in-depth unstructured interviews with police officers, this study is an exploratory piece of research.

This study presents findings in which police officers spoke of the surveillance they encounter from the perspective of the police organisation; their own self-surveillance as well as being monitored by other police officers. This paper argues that the Panopticon Effect can negatively impact on individual officers as well as overall police practice.

This paper is an exploratory study based on the experiences of rank and file police officers currently in service. The paper considers the surveillance and scrutiny of police officers from within the organisation and recognises the impact of technology.

This chapter aims to make a contribution to recent debates on the ‘governance of security’ (Johnston & Shearing, 2003) by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the author and other writers on ‘plural policing’ and the construction of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance networks. The chapter attempts to avoid the tendency in some of the ‘governmentality’ literature to ‘airbrush out the state’ (Hughes, 2007, p. 184), whilst at the same time showing that the aims and intentions of dominant state forces and elites are not always realised in practice. The chapter also tries to avoid any simplistic notion of a shift in policing strategies from ‘crime fighting’ to ‘risk management’. The aim instead is to show how the construction of surveillance networks is blurring the boundaries of the ‘public–private’ divide along the ‘sectoral’, ‘geographical’, ‘spatial’, ‘legal’ and ‘functional’ dimensions (Jones & Newburn, 1998), giving rise to a plural policing continuum.

This chapter is about the politics of surveillance and more specifically about the politics of siting public closed circuit television (CCTV) systems within urban neighborhoods. Through an exploration of political contests waged around attempts by local police to install public surveillance systems in the City of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Granville Mall districts, we argue that the success of public surveillance proposals is hardly inevitable. Instead, a combination of local factors play vital roles in variously supporting or constraining such attempts. Although this present chapter can be read as providing a useful counterpoint to the dominance of accounts about such developments in Great Britain, where public CCTV is a routine fact of daily urban life, we conclude on a cautionary note: with the current proliferation of public and private forms of surveillance throughout urban spaces, surveillance analysts risk missing the forest for the trees if we only concentrate on the fate of one surveillance tool or tactic.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the traditional placement of CCTV within the realm of crime prevention technologies and to propose a conceptualisation of surveillance cameras that takes into account how different elements interact to shape how these are understood, defined and used in the day-to-day practices of the police.

Methodologically, the research draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two medium-sized Italian cities where open-street CCTV systems have been recently implemented and is based on a combination of non-participant observations and interviews with police officers in both forces.

Overall, two main findings emerge from the fieldwork. First, cameras are rarely used and not for reasons pertaining to crime control; rather, they have become a tool for the efficient management of scarce policing resources, with particular emphasis on the co-ordination and real-time tracking of patrolling personnel. Second, this shift is understood in radically different ways by officers in the two cities, so that what is experienced as a benign form of peer-to-peer co-ordination in Central City becomes a form of undue surveillance on the part of higher ranks in Northern City.

The value of the present work is twofold. On one hand, it provides relevant information to police practitioners on how organisational and structural factors impact on the use of surveillance cameras in policing. On the other, embracing the idea that CCTV is constructed through the interaction of several distinct, yet related, processes can explain why the same technology is implemented, defined and used in different ways in comparable organisations.

Police technology fundamentally shapes the police role, and the adoption of technology is even linked to the success of police reforms. Police adoption of emerging technological tools changes the way police interact with citizens. The change in police citizen interactions can then have serious implications for the social control that police have over citizens, the civil liberties citizens enjoy, police accountability, and the legitimacy that the police hold in contemporary American society.

While technology impacts these critical issues in policing, not all technology adopted by the police is likely to influence their relationship with the public. As such, this chapter closely examines the ways that several emerging technologies adopted by the police (i.e., body-worn cameras (BWC), aerial surveillance, visual surveillance, social media, mapping and crime prediction, and less lethal force technology) impact issues related to social control, accountability, and legitimacy. The current literature seems to indicate that some innovations such as BWCs enhance police accountability and legitimacy, and also expand social control. Other technologies such as aerial surveillance and conducted energy devices increase social control, and display a complicated or unclear influence over police legitimacy.

The study explores the use of video to document police interaction with citizens and its role in the renaissance of a contemporary crisis focused on police use-of-force, race relations, and legitimacy in the United States. The saturation of communication technologies and network access have ushered an era of citizens watching the police, consolidating the new visibility of policing and potentially reorganizing to some degree the power dynamics of traditional police/community relations.

The argument is supported through a triangulated analysis that draws on several data sources about video technology use by both citizens and police, media coverage of police shootings, and public opinion on trends in police excessive force.

The institution of policing is experiencing a legitimacy crisis that is fueled by high-profile police shootings of African Americans by white police officers captured by video technology. The public increasingly expects access to video of police/citizen encounters, which redefines the public’s role in police accountability matters as well as the consequences for police legitimacy.

The theory illuminates the ways in which video has become central to public and official discourse in police use-of-force cases and the problems its presence and absence presents in police/community relations. The ability of citizens to record and widely share video of police encounters is a new development in the ability of citizens and police reform advocates to frame the discourse on police/community relations, accountability, and legitimacy.

We live in an age of unparalleled access to personal data. Technological advances that seem second nature today allow for the mass accumulation of personal information by even the smallest of companies. The same technology also can be used directly by the state to accumulate mass information on its citizens. In the hands of government law enforcement officials, these surveillance advances also can be used to greatly enhance the state’s ability to exercise social control – a circumstance that has both positive and negative connotations. This chapter discusses the increasingly important confluence of privacy rights, surveillance, and social control as seen from a constitutional standpoint.

After years of limiting the expectations of privacy that citizens may have in their day-to-day lives, several recent Supreme Court decisions have attempted to take account of the privacy expectations held by individuals in today’s ever-evolving technological world, and in doing so have limited the ability of law enforcement to engage in surveillance without first obtaining a warrant. Yet more needs to be done. Specifically, the author argues that the law of standing must be updated to permit judicial claims by individuals who challenge the legality and constitutionality of comprehensive surveillance programs.