Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.
 

"Newell’s informed recommendations move the policy conversation in a productive direction. They serve as an important bulwark against the ‘surveil now, ask questions later’ ethos undergirding much of the body camera policies currently in place."

* Jotwell *
"An exemplary case of an ethnography of a particularly difficult to reach group." * Surveillance & Society *
"Bryce Newell has produced a well-researched study. . . .for those researching and writing on the efficacy and potential pitfalls of police [body-worn cameras]s, Newell’s necessary and impressive work should be your starting point." * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *

Bryce Clayton Newell is Assistant Professor of Media Law and Policy in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He is the editor of Police on Camera, Privacy in Public Space, and Surveillance, Privacy, and Public Space.