Surveillance and Crime

Roy Coleman, Michael McCahill

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446245309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Surveillance has a long-standing relationship with crime and its identification, prevention, detection and punishment. With information on each citizen spanning up to 700 databases, and over 4 million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom alone, this book explores how new technologies have given rise to new forms of monitoring and control.

Offering a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between surveillance, crime and criminal justice, this book explores:

• the development of surveillance technologies within a broad historical context
• how new surveillance technologies are shaped by existing social relations, political practices, cultural traditions and organizational contexts
• the implications of the use of surveillance in responding to crime (including biometrics, DNA samples and electronic monitoring)
• how ?new? surveillance technologies reinforce ?old? social divisions - particularly along the lines of class, race, gender and age.

The book draws upon theoretical debates from a range of disciplines to shed light on this topical subject. Engaging and authoritative, this is an important read for advanced students and academics in criminology, criminal justice, social policy and sociology.

The Key Approaches to Criminology series celebrates the removal of traditional barriers between disciplines and, specifically, reflects criminology's interdisciplinary nature and focus. It brings together some of the leading scholars working at the intersections of criminology and related subjects. Each book in the series helps readers to make intellectual connections between criminology and other discourses, and to understand the importance of studying crime and criminal justice within the context of broader debates.

The series is intended to have appeal across the entire range of undergraduate and postgraduate studies and beyond, comprising books which offer introductions to the fields as well as advancing ideas and knowledge in their subject areas.

1

Introduction: Surveillance, Crime and Controversy

CHAPTER CONTENTS

Surveillance, crime and social context

A ‘surveillance society’?

Questioning surveillance and the plan of the book

OVERVIEW

Chapter Chapter 1 provides:

• An introductory discussion of surveillance as a social issue and the kinds of problems this gives rise to for students of surveillance

KEY TERMS

• Surveillance society
• Tax fraud / social security fraud
• The social construction of crime
• Visibility

Crime is, above all, a function of the resources available to know it. (Manning, 1972: 234)

Criminality is born […] by means of ever more closely placed insertions, under ever more insistent surveillance. (Foucault, 1979: 301)

How do we come to recognise crime? Clearly our own experiences are important in forming our perceptions, which in turn rely upon a whole range of activities that ‘watch’, monitor and report on the crime problem. Official statistics, victim surveys, media narratives and official pronouncements all combine to produce and socially authorise knowledge about crime. All these areas overlap with, and in themselves constitute, forms of surveillance defined in dictionary terms as ‘vigilant supervision, superintendence’; as ‘a watch kept over someone or something, especially over a criminal (and his or her activities)’ (Chambers Dictionary, 1993). This watching aspect is aligned fundamentally to a process of categorisation towards the collation of knowledge about crime over time and space. It has technical aspects (the creation of records, databases, tables and maps) as well as normative features (rules, values and standards pertaining to correct behaviour). In this sense, knowledge of the crime problem is accrued and forms the basis from which to intervene, control and correct ‘crime’.

Surveillance and crime, then, are intimately connected. By this we mean that knowledge about crime would be impossible without surveillance, along with any attempt to manage crime and criminality. On a common-sense level this relationship may appear straightforward: crime exists as an incontrovertible and self-evident ‘fact’ requiring little debate because it is outlawed, ‘socially harmful’, ‘bad’ and ‘immoral’. Surveillance, then, merely responds to crime – it is a key aspect of crime fighting: it prevents, detects, categorises, controls and corrects the criminal and the wayward. We glimpse this view in official pronouncements calling for ever greater vigilance over the ‘unruly’, the ‘anti-social’, the ‘potential terrorist’, the ‘hardened criminal’ or the mere ‘nuisance’. Indeed, knowledge surrounding these categories seems boundless and from this ‘crime’ is very much seen as a problem of the streets and surveillance as the guardian. Establishing parent and child classes for the ‘anti-social’, calls for ‘respect’, child curfews and spy cameras in neighbourhoods and urban spaces, calls for more police powers, more prisons and ways to collate information about the criminal – all attest to the idea that surveillance responds to crime and disorder; to both know and control it. In some respects surveillance may serve to make some of us feel better – ‘something is being done’ – the law abiding are protected and society is kept ‘in the know’ about criminality. Developments in surveillance are often couched in terms of the ‘public interest’ along with the common refrain that those ‘who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear’ from surveillance.

Moreover, supporters of surveillance point to its ‘successes’ in identifying and prosecuting criminals (for example, in the use of surveillance evidence in courtrooms or on TV shows such as the BBC’s Crimewatch). This official perspective tenders the view that extending surveillance (more police stops, community patrols, street cameras, nationality and credit checks and the like) makes for a more secure society and encourages feelings of safety. This view of the intersection between surveillance and crime appears uncontroversial and, for many, even incontrovertible. It is just common sense.

But does surveillance merely respond to crime, trapping wrongdoers and aiding their prosecution, as well as reducing anxiety? Is the knowledge accrued from surveillance an accurate reflection of the spatial and temporal distribution of crime, harm and injury in society? If we were to answer in the affirmative, then any controversies concerning surveillance would be nullified and we could confidently proclaim that surveillance is useful and necessary because it targets society’s most harmful activities, which we usually label as ‘criminal’. In this book, the assumptions buried in common-sense views will be deconstructed and subject to critical scrutiny. This is because both surveillance and crime are more controversial than first appearances suggest. Indeed, the growth of surveillance has always been accompanied by contentious questions. These include whether surveillance ‘works’; to what extent it invades ‘privacy’; how surveillance relates to justice (both criminal and social); and how it operates within unequal and divided social landscapes characterised in terms of class, ‘race’, gender, age and sexuality. There is a need, then, to place surveillance practice within actually existing social relations, political priorities and prevailing cultural practices (McCahill, 2002; Coleman, 2004), which is the main goal of this book.

Surveillance, crime and social context

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Surveillance relates to questions of visibility – what can be seen, how it is seen and what are the consequences of enhanced or decreased visibility? Surveillance does not exist in a social vacuum. Exploring the ways in which surveillance and visibility are practised needs to take into account social, political and cultural factors. Questions concerning what ‘surveillance’ is, and how it is practised, also engender questions surrounding what ‘crime’ is and how it is rendered ‘visible’. Both categories are rarely straightforward and only become socially meaningful when explored in social relations (and their imbalances of power, hierarchical forms of organisation and contentious debates around what constitutes a ‘social problem’).

Let us take the example of surveillance and fraud, both in the form of corporate tax fraud and social security benefit fraud. In 2009, corporate tax dodging in the UK was estimated to cost the British state up to £13.7 billion a year in lost tax revenue. This information was garnered through a Freedom of Information request in 2005 and led to a series of debates on the issue in the Guardian newspaper from early in 2009. Tax ‘evasion’ is practised in at least two ways. First, there is avoidance, through which companies exploit loopholes or lack of clarity in the law to reduce their tax bill or shift a company’s location off-shore as a means of avoidance. In the UK this is not illegal. Secondly, there is tax evasion, practised through illegal means to conceal company income (The Guardian, 14 February 2009). This vast area of hidden and illegal practices is policed by prosecutors in the Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office (RCPO). Tax fraud is acknowledged to be a widespread problem but it is difficult to see or accrue knowledge about it because of the legal ambiguities, corporate obfuscation and secrecy surrounding the practice (The Guardian, 14 February 2009).

On the other hand, social security benefit fraud in the UK is estimated by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). This Department produced figures for 2007–08 to state that ‘benefit thieves stole an estimated £800 million from public funds’ (http://research.dwp.gov.uk/campaigns/benefit-thieves/index.asp). This problem provides a press and broadcast diet of ‘scam’ stories, although figures regarding its seriousness and extent are contested (Cook, 2006: 55–56). Typical frauds here are in the hundreds of pounds scale, occasionally going into much higher figures.

These two instances of fraud have quite different social impacts measured in terms of their respective ‘costs’, the former example of fraud far outweighing the latter in terms of financial costs. In terms of corporate tax evasion and the ability of companies to move to off-shore locations, there is a socially harmful knock-on effect upon public taxation policies reformulated to make up for tax losses and in how states compete with one another to attract businesses with tax exemptions. One may think, then, that surveillance resources, legal controls and cultural censure would accumulate around tax evasion in that this represents a more serious form of social harm, at least as it is measured in financial and human terms. However, making this assumption would be to ignore how surveillance is located in social relations and reflects and reinforces asymmetries of power and social capital within them.

In the mid-1980s the ratio of prosecutions for tax fraud and benefit fraud was 1:30. By 2004 the ratio was up to 1 tax fraud prosecution for 250 relating to benefit fraud (Cook, 2006). The RCPO has just over 300 staff to monitor and investigate tax fraud whereas the DWP has over 3,000 fraud surveillance officers in its team of investigators. Like the RCPO, the DWP favours a selective prosecution policy and uses cautions and benefit withdrawal as penalties. In 2006/07 the DWP’s surveillance of benefit fraudsters resulted in sanctions (including prosecutions, cautions and other penalties) that totalled 51,000. In 2009/10, RCPO’s surveillance activities resulted in 23 prosecutions for tax fraud (RCPO, 2009). In the UK since the early 1980s, there has been a general trend in the increase of surveillance and targeting of benefit fraud while scrutiny over the tax fraud has declined. Welfare claimants and benefit fraudsters in particular are surrounded by a range of surveillance technologies and programmes that intimately oversee their eligibility for work, leisure patterns and family status (Gilliom, 2006).

These examples show us that ‘crime’, ‘misdemeanour’ and ‘deviance’ are categories which do not speak for themselves. The levels of ‘harm’ they each generate does not correspond in any simple sense to what one may consider ‘appropriate’ and proportionate levels of surveillance, control and censure. Here we glimpse controversy in surveillance practice, not only in terms of what is targeted, but how and why it is targeted. The discrepancies in the targeting and pursuing of these types of fraud can only be explained by placing the ‘problem of fraud’ within its wider social context, out of which ‘surveillance’ and ‘crime’ emerge as meaningful social categories. In each of these examples, the decision to enact particular surveillance strategies towards the particular ‘problem’ highlight how surveillance takes place within, and acts to reinforce, a wider communicative process that encompasses particular values and interests that shape, define and respond to social problems and social groups in specific ways.

There are three aspects to this process. First, as Dee Cook (2006) has shown, there is a wider historical and ideological context at work here. Historically, the idea of the taxpayer has been positively represented as a productive, orderly and useful citizen: taxpayers give revenue for state services. On the other hand, the unproductive benefit claimant has been represented as someone who uses or takes from the state. These two contrasting representations continue to ‘serve to shape very different social, political, judicial and public responses to the relatively rich and the poor when they breach citizenship “rules” and/or the law’ (Cook, 2006: 47). Secondly, various surveys have shown that only a minority of the population in the UK think that tax evasion is ‘wrong’ at the same time as reports have appeared stating that a majority of the population believe benefit fraud to be a major problem and deserving of harsh responses (see Cook, 2006: 49). Thirdly, a wider social focus on the problem of benefit fraudsters has been encouraged through negative media portrayals representing them as ‘spongers’, ‘cheats’, ‘scroungers’ and ‘criminals’: the £800 million in benefits stolen ‘from the public’ by ‘thieves’ in 2008, it is argued, could have been spent on public services. Such people are construed as an ‘enemy within’ (Cook, 2006: 54).

These interlinked contextual factors highlight issues in the politics of surveillance and how the latter cannot simply be understood as a ‘natural’ outcome or response to the level of harm found in society. Surveillance takes place within, and is the result of, these wider discourses which help frame surveillant responses. Surveillance, then, does not simply respond to ‘crime’ as such, but responds to socially constructed forms of public anxiety about particular social problems which may come to be defined as ‘crime’, without any necessary relationship to objective measurements relating to ‘harms’, ‘costs’, ‘injuries’ or ‘damages’. Indeed, ‘the word “crime” is rarely associated with tax evasion’, which is instead understood as compliance with the law (Cook, 2006: 48). So in saturating TV and newspaper space, government campaigns against benefit fraudsters are explicit in this respect. In 2009 the campaign against benefit fraud went under the title: ‘We’re closing in with every means at our disposal’ against ‘those who steal benefits [and] are picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers’. The campaign trumpeted its ‘3,000 fraud investigators, carrying out over 2,000 investigations every week, cross-checking the bank accounts of benefit thieves using hidden cameras and mobile surveillance’ (http://research.dwp.gov.uk/campaigns/benefit-thieves/index.asp). ‘Hotlines’ and online reporting services also invite the ‘honest’ public into this surveillance web by encouraging them to report ‘cheaters’. By 2008, 25 housing benefit offices in England and Wales had installed ‘voice risk analysis technology’ (lie detectors) to test welfare claimants’ ‘honesty’ in providing information about their living and working circumstances (The Guardian, 3 December 2008).

Through these processes, benefit fraud is transformed into a visible ‘social problem’ and this is reinforced by the surveillance capabilities that have been marshalled to police it. The same cannot be said of tax evasion, where no comparable sustained and negative/deterrent publicity campaigns or public reporting of offenders exists, despite the more costly and prevalent nature of this activity (Cook, 2006: 54).

What impacts do these kinds of surveillance have upon those subject to it? What ‘public interest’ is being served? Again, the answers challenge one-dimensional views of surveillance. Poverty campaigners and civil liberties groups have argued that the panoply of surveillance and penalties imposed on welfare claimants prosecuted for fraud has a detrimental impact on their lives, in disrupting family relationships and increasing hardships, along with little or no understanding of the causes that underlie benefit fraud. On the other hand, this punitiveness, in making poor families pay back welfare cheques, for example, can be contrasted to the vast tax write-off...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• 1 Introduction: Surveillance, Crime and Controversy
• 2 Understanding Surveillance
• 3 The Historical Foundations of Surveillance
• 4 New Policing and New Surveillance
• 5 Globalisation, Surveillance and the ‘War’ on Terror
• 6 Surveillance, Power and Social Impacts
• 7 ‘Contesting’ and ‘Resisting’ Surveillance: The Politics of Visibility and Invisibility
• 8 Deconstructing Surveillance, Crime and Power
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index