The Myopic Panopticon: The Social Consequences of Policing Through the Lens

The article describes the possible effects of video surveillance and related technologies on policing, not at the instrumental level but from a symbolic perspective. It is shown that actual effectiveness of the technology has little impact on procurement and development, that it is the discourse of surveillance that is transforming official social control. The vision of crime afforded by the camera is "myopic" because it reduces crime to behavior and crime control to incident response; and doing so threatens to transform policing into a purely reactive activity inspired by military standards and technologies.