How to make police visible. Revisiting policing’s new visibility: the case of the French Yellow Vests movement

Research has identified several trends converging towards greater visibility of policing behaviour, and in particular the proliferation of smartphones with built-in cameras. However, this process of visibilisation is not an automatic one. This article posits that an understanding of the phenomenon of policing's new visibility should integrate the role of intermediaries between ordinary people filming the police and the large-scale publicisation of images of police brutality. We develop the concept of visibility entrepreneurs to analyse the emergence of new actors and new formats that participate in the visibility of police use of force and its framing as potentially illegitimate. The concept is applied to the case of the French ‘Yellow Vests’ social movement, which was widely publicised in both mainstream and social media. While protest violence took hold right from the start of the movement, this framing gradually had to compete with another, emphasising police violence. The emergence of this new framing was helped by the emergence of visibility entrepreneurs, who created new journalistic formats for exposing police violence. Three main characteristics – multiplicity, technicity, virality – of these journalistic innovations are analysed. The trends observed during the Yellow Vests movement require further research regarding their impact and consequences on activism, police behaviour and police-community relations which we explore in the conclusion.