Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on surveillance-conscious encounters between watchers and watched in urban policing. It explores how CCTV cameras influence the behavior of those who know that human eyes are behind the machine’s surveillance gaze in order to understand the symbolic meaning ascribed to cameras.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when surveillance-conscious eyes meet the animated gaze of video surveillance cameras? How do these encounters influence the behavior of police staff and youths from disadvantaged neighborhoods who know that there are people behind the cameras watching them in real-time?

This paper draws on ethnographic observations in CCTV control rooms in French municipalities to explore how cameras are appropriated and contested through ordinary encounters between CCTV operators behind the screens and those watched in front of the cameras. In these technologically mediated interactions, far from being objective eyewitnesses (Jeursen 2022), the cameras as third parties evoke behavioral change. In consequence, some CCTV operators avoid cameras to escape the gaze of their colleagues, and youth from disadvantaged neighborhoods check with a hasty glance towards the camera whether or not they are being followed. These mundane surveillance-conscious encounters inform us about the entanglements between watchers and watched (Brayne 2021) and the shared meaning ascribed to an object such as the surveillance camera. More extraordinary encounters, such as the destruction of CCTV cameras, exemplify how these objects are appropriated through contestation – and thus inform us about a less well-known side of their social and political life (Appadurai 1986, Fassin 2017).

By drawing on the classic example of video surveillance in urban policing, this paper investigates the possibility that some panoptic properties of video surveillance cameras may influence mostly those who are conscious that when they look into the camera lens, someone might look back.