Paper short abstract:

Technologies are shaping policework in ways not previously envisaged or well understood. Cameras capture incidents. Tasers enable a response. Each demands an explanation from officers. What emerges is an alignment between officers and technologies.

Paper long abstract:

I draw on six years of ethnographic fieldwork observing frontline officers in England. Throughout, I observed the arrival of new technologies (e.g., Taser, body-worn cameras) intended to make policework easier and more transparent. But practices changed in ways not envisaged. Far from simply improving accountability, videos required that officers’ statements about incidents align with the recorded data. Inscribed in reports, these statements became immutable and mobile, informing other officers and configuring their future encounters.

This paper reviews a single incident in depth. An officer, confronted with what she believes to be a violent male, draws her Taser as he reaches for a metallic object. As other officers arrive at the scene, things calm down. Her action could now be seen as rash. When the man is arrested, the female officer must write a statement justifying her use of Taser. She checks her observations with colleagues (and with me as the observer). Crucially, she also checks the camera footage. She constructs a statement that aligns with the electronic evidence. This construction is shared widely in police intelligence databases. It becomes the reality of what happened, and also takes on legal status.

This paper argues that recent enthusiasm in policing for technological solutions is naïve to their use in practice. New technologies do not simply record or enable. They are adopted and adapted to fit the needs of officers. Similarly, officers have to adapt to that technology, aligning their accounts and actions to construct a reality that withstands future scrutiny.