Open-street camera surveillance and governance in Canada.

• Author: Walby, Kevin

Au lieu de s'inspirer d'une variante non differenciee du panopticon de Michel Foucault ou de conceptualiser la surveillance comme simple mesure imposee par les instances superieures, l'auteur soutient que l'utilisation de la surveillance video dans les rues publiques est fondee sur diverses perspectives sociales qui se chevauchent les unes les autres. En tant que projet de controle s'inscrivant dans ce cadre plus global qu'est la gouvernance, la surveillance video dans les rues publiques peut etre declenchee par des intervenants en haut, au milieu ou en bas de la hierarchie societale. Ainsi, le haut de la hierarchie representerait une instance politique ou administrative ; le milieu serait occupe par des entrepreneurs; et le bas representerait des citoyens qui chercheraient des mesures de controle pour proteger leur collectivite en faisant preuve d'entrepreneurship moral et en se liguant souvent avec les medias locaux d'information. Cependant, ce processus peut etre inverse : le pouvoir se diffuse a travers les populations, de sorte que des regroupements de citoyens possederaient le pouvoir de contester toute mesure de controle dans leur collectivite. Afin d'etayer ces postulats, l'auteur exploite des donnees provenant de reportages, de questionnaires et d'entrevues sur la proliferation de la surveillance video dans les rues publiques du Canada. En puisant dans les sociologies de la gouvernance, du risque et de l'etude critique des medias, et en presentant une trajectoire theorique plus nuancee que celle des theories fondees sur des conceptualisations descendantes du pouvoir, de la politique et de la communication, l'auteur met en cause les modeles theoriques dominants concernant la surveillance video dans les rues publiques afin de demontrer que cette forme de controle peut s'exercer a partir de divers rangs de la hierarchie societale.

Introduction

Despite a recent surge in the number of researchers interested in social monitoring as a topic of inquiry, an overarching theoretical or analytical perspective is not apparent in the area of surveillance studies. This is because of the eclectic mix of persons involved in researching surveillance processes. Political scientists tend to study policy issues concerning privacy; urban geographers examine the connection between social space and justice; communications theorists consider media processes; criminologists focus on the relation between surveillance and crime control; and sociologists focus on inequality, order, change, and the individual-society relationship. Synthesizing these differing but interconnected literatures allows for a better understanding of surveillance processes. Only through integration can surveillance studies create appropriate theoretical models for discussing social monitoring practices.

Theoretical arguments need to be continually probed and tested in order to confirm that they correspond with empirical social conditions. In this article I ask whether surveillance theorists and criminologists are able to explain adequately the ascension of open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance in Europe and North America. The surveillance literature tends to reproduce a top-down approach to the deployment of social monitoring practices. A more representative framework for analysis would propose that regulatory projects such as open-street CCTV can be generated, but also contested, from numerous social positions. I am interested in lifting the analysis of camera surveillance out of the sometimes empirically narrow and theoretically constricted field of criminology and into governance studies (see O'Malley 1999). Following Tully (2001: 51), governance is defined as any coordinated form of human interaction that involves reciprocal, multiple, and overlapping relations of power and authority in which the actions of some agents guide the actions of others. Such courses of action entail long-term processes of normalization whereby formations of the self are realized through interaction with, or regulation of, Others. Governance is power acting through populations, in a field of conflicting interests and alliances, spread out to a multitude of sites, including local, regional, national, international, and global authorities but also corporations, charities, families, and the self. Past studies of regulatory projects, however, have overdetermined the role of the state (see Corrigan and Sayer 1985; compare Valverde and Weir 1988), and one concern of this article is how regulatory projects are generated and contested from the level of civic governance. I therefore conclude that the theoretical underpinnings of surveillance studies are in a position to expose, but not fully explain, the rise of open-street CCTV surveillance, substantiating this claim with media, questionnaire, and interview data regarding the rise of open-street CCTV in Canada.

In the first of the article's four sections I offer a brief empirical sketch of the current extent of open-street CCTV proliferation in Canada. The second section evaluates the generally top-down approaches that have constituted surveillance studies in the past. Of importance here are George Orwell's cultural icon of Big Brother, Anthony Giddens's work on the state, and Michel Foucault's ubiquitous panopticon. I argue that these works are problematic because of the epistemological assumptions they make regarding politics, power, and communication. In the third section I examine a growing body of literature that explains open-street CCTV as bound up in the politics of neo-liberalism, arguing that the "neo-liberalism as catch-ail" approach, which purports to move beyond deterministic top-down models of surveillance, does not go far enough in terms of analysing the communicative processes that legitimate urban camera surveillance with the populace. Finally, viewing the intensification of surveillance measures as always intimately linked with the proliferation of mass forms of communication, I argue that, in terms of social positioning, projects that seek to regulate socially constructed perceptions of deviance and disorder can emerge from above, from the middle, or from the bottom. Pace governmental approaches that stress the futility of resisting productive power, I will also show, with Foucault, that resistance is the base of power and citizens can resist the implementation of regulatory projects in their communities. Regulation is always contested. I use the examples of London and Brockville, ON, to demonstrate these theses empirically.

The ascension of open-street CCTV in Canada

Open-street CCTV is an assemblage of people, places, and technologies, where a person watches on TV a social field which is visualized by a video camera. Whereas the rise of open-street CCTV surveillance as a crime control tool in England has been documented (see Fyfe and Bannister 1996; McCahill 2002; Norris 2003; Norris and Armstrong 1999; Williams and Johnstone 2000), the rise of open-street CCTV in Canada has been ignored in the burgeoning international literature on camera surveillance. The following section briefly details the rise of open-street CCTV in Canada in order to contextualize the arguments that follow.

Although Sherbooke, QC, became the first Canadian city to implement open-street CCTV in 1991, open-street CCTV gained popularity in the Canadian crime control culture circa the mid-1990s. In December 1996, Sudbury became the first Ontario city to implement an open-street CCTV camera. Former Sudbury chief of police Alex McCauley initiated the operative in response to concerns from business owners and seniors concerning safety in the downtown area (O'Flanagan 2002). Plans for a video monitoring program in Sudbury began in 1994 when Chief McCauley learned of the CityWatch Program in Glasgow, Scotland: a monitoring system consisting of 32 cameras modelled on apparent success rates realized in Airdrie and Birmingham, UK (see Fyfe and Bannister 1996: 40-41). McCauley then visited Scotland in 1995 and worked out the plans for CCTV in Sudbury (see KPMG 2000: 9). The Sudbury project is aptly named Lion's Eye in the Sky, as the Lions Club was a major funding partner, although Northern Voice and Video (which donated the first camera), Sudbury Hydro, CP Rail, Sudbury Metro Centre, and Ontario Works have also been contributors. Other municipal police services in Canada began to justify their own CCTV plans by pointing to the rumoured efficacy of Sudbury's cameras in reducing crime and "antisocial" behaviour. Based on the perceived successes of the Lions Eye in the Sky, other Canadian municipal police services--London, Hamilton, Toronto, Guelph, and Barrie, ON, plus Kelowna and Vancouver, BC--have promoted open-street CCTV surveillance to reduce crime, fear of crime, and "antisocial" behaviour. This evidence suggests that open-street CCTV initiatives in Canada are often based directly on initiatives in the United Kingdom or on other "successful" Canadian initiatives which are themselves based on U.K. camera monitoring schemas. Sudbury is the major node of entry for the ascension of open-street CCTV in Canada.

While often police are the agency whose impetus results in the implementation of open-street CCTV, sometimes the impetus comes from a different social position. CCTV went live in London, ON, on 9 November 2001. Monitored by commissionaires at City Hall, cameras are strategically placed at 16 corners in downtown London and have the ability to pan and zoom. Official objectives of the CCTV system are (1) to provide and maintain a safe environment downtown; (2) to deter crime and "antisocial" behaviour; (3) to increase economic activity downtown; and (4) to improve the ability of police to react and respond to crime and "antisocial" behaviour. However, the 16-camera operative is a citizens' initiative. The violent 1999 murder of Michael Goldie-Ryder resulted in the formation of Friends Against Senseless Endings...