Mischievous infrastructure: tactical secrecy through infrastructural friction in police video systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT Police departments across the United States have adopted body cameras as a technological solution to conflicts between police and communities. A wide variety of stakeholders, including governments, corporations, and the police themselves, have positioned body cameras as devices that increase transparency and enable accountability in controversial situations. However, the lofty assurances made before the adoption of body cameras are often renegotiated after the fact, undermining the realization of such values. To understand the gap between the promise and practice of body cameras, this paper turns from the device towards the infrastructure of police video systems, analyzing the containment of body camera videos within law enforcement’s evidence regime, a system of knowledge management that determines which information is suitable for public consumption and what becomes, or remains, a state secret. The potential of police video infrastructures is consistently frustrated by the creation of infrastructural friction, or small acts of mischief that trouble the system, interrupt its functions, and prevent it from fully realizing its promises. Police and other stakeholders resistant to the goals of transparency and accountability control which videos are released, when they become public, and how they are accessible. These tactics produce a mischievous infrastructure, equipped to produce secrecy and opacity as easily as transparency and accountability. Ultimately, body cameras and other police video systems have evaded and even worked against transparency and accountability on an infrastructural level rather than enabling their pursuit.