Abstract
Media and surveillance scholars often comment on the purported empowering quality of transparency, which they expect participatory media to promote. From its Enlightenment origins, transparency is related to accountability and legitimacy: its increase is believed to promote these. It has earned a position as an unassailed, prime normative value in contemporary liberal and social democracies. Though still valued, transparency is undergoing change in an era of ubiquitous surveillance. Publics still anticipate governmental and corporate self-disclosure and for such entities to operate visibly; but increasingly, deliberate and incidental surveillance by a range of sources, both institutional and informal, documents the activities of such authorities. More often, civilians participate in producing or amplifying transparency. This article explores this new transparency through a study of U.S. police, focusing on the discourse of police accountability activists and cop watchers to describe how their work adapts traditional notions of transparency. Recognizing the resilience of the police institution despite the new visibility of its violence, the article challenges the presumption that increased transparency will promote institutional reform or crisis. It concludes with a critical comment on prominent expectations that promoting the visibility of police can protect publics and ensure police accountability. This conclusion has implications for other forms of the new transparency, including whistleblowing (e.g., Edward Snowden) and leaking (e.g., WikiLeaks).
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the special issue "Surveillance: Critical Analysis and Current Challenges", edited by James Schwoch (Northwestern University, USA), John Laprise (Independent Researcher) and Ivory Mills (Northwestern University, USA)
This article historicizes contemporary accountability practices, with an extended case study of police accountability activism, showing the intellectual and practical connections from these practices to a political concept rooted in Enlightenment political thought
I begin with the Enlightenment origins of the concept of transparency as it relates to its use in discourse about policing’s new visibility
Summary
Though he never used the term, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed transparency was the pre-civilization condition of the state of nature (Hood, 2006). Nicholas de La Mare’s “police science” in his Traité de la Police in 1713 articulated strategies for the prevention of disorder that emphasized street lighting and open spaces, optimizing public view and surveillance (Hood, 2006) This early approach to policy shows a technocratic orientation to transparency, where the visibility of citizens was made a function of the built environment. As the modern state developed, political transparency was seen as a prerequisite for or even an assurance of accountability of officials or bureaucracies It became a result of rules being publicized, procedures being predictable, and the self-disclosure of institutionally empowered actors demonstrating conformity to these standards (Hood, 2006; Tyler, 2006). The following will explain how this modern conception of transparency has been preserved, adapted, and is even amplified within the new transparency, an outcome both of the performances of a surveillance society, and the mythos of what Byung-Chul Han (2012) has called transparenzgesellschaft, or the “transparency society.”
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