It’s Not Just A Picture
We have come a long way from Elie Weisel’s fantasy of using pictures to punish by simply making victims visible. Wiesel shields himself from his own sadistic impulses by proposing punishment by representation – effectively saying to himself, “It’s just a picture”. With the invention of a picturing device that actually punishes, that inflicts not just emotional pain but extreme physical pain, one that collapses the distance between a perception of the problem and administering punishment for it, we risk the very evidence itself making the event seem “only a picture” and therefore “unreal.” In the video-equipped Taser we have a device that records photographically but one that draws on different media habits for deployment – the rapid reflexes of aggressive video games where the task is somehow to control or eliminate “others”. These “others” in the real world of people getting tased are often mentally ill, foreign or not competent in the local language, members of minorities, women, the elderly, and the young.[6]
In this fantasy space, a “harmless” Taser makes talk unnecessary – there needs to be no communicative relationship between the person of authority (whoever has the stun gun) and the other. With no talk needed, there is no debate, there are no alternative points of view that need to be resolved. There is just power, all action; it’s very simple in this reductive universe. There are many reasons to be concerned about this use of technology. If we begin to assimilate this as the way things are, then how will we be able to object to the use of robots for law enforcement? [Marks]
In courtrooms with screens showing all kinds of moving pictures, will we be able to make critical and informed judgments based on photographic material that is now being generated in a culture where the old norms of photojournalism are seriously frayed, where people know that pictures can be altered? Will we be able to watch and step back from the gratification of our own sadism to think critically about the Taser picture? Alternatively, will police forces reject the supervision that tasercam might provide and therefore fail to equip stun guns with this feature? Will we be able to respond to counter stories about those very pictures? Are we concerned with justice or do we simply want to restore order after a threat of chaos, and if so, how far are we willing to go with regimes of control? How will we determine the proper role of pictures in the pursuit of justice? How these questions are answered will help to define whether we sink completely into an authoritarian culture of control or rescue our democratic ideals. History gives us some pause and some reason for cheer.
In The Story of Cruel and Unusual, Colin Dyan links the conditions of America’s current penal system to the old institutions of slavery and both to the debates on torture that spanned the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama presidency. She asks, “What do prisoners, ‘security detainees,’ and ‘illegal enemy combatants’ in U.S. custody all have in common? They are all bodies. Few are granted minds. The unspoken assumption is that prisoners are not persons.”[Dyan, pg. 90]. It is unknown whether the taser-play represented on videos in YouTube circulation will have a dulling effect on their audience, normalizing a tool of law enforcement that can also be used as an instrument of torture [Regali] [Miller i], or whether a younger generation of participants in the legal system will bring new literacies to bear. Habits from their own use of photography and, most especially, their experiences editing it with widely available digital tools, may cause younger people to be able to think more critically about what they are seeing. Will they be more able to see the doubleness of iconic pictures – that they look like what we see but that they also have mediated effects and are not just slices of “reality”? And will they be able to maintain this under the viewing pressures of 29.5 frames a second?
Viewers of weaponized video will need moral imagination. They will have to begin by seeing that the person tased is a human being with rights. They will have to refuse the pleasures of the images of control and mastery over that person by an officer of the law enough to evaluate those same pictures in the context of other evidence in the case. Supervisors reviewing the Taser recordings to monitor their own operations will face the same sorts of questions, only the recordings will be even more normalized because they are a part of normal institutional practices. Will they pay attention? First, video recording ought to be mandatory on every stun gun unit sold. Users should know that their decision to deploy might be monitored and subject to review by some external authority. Supervisors should be required to keep detailed data on Taser deployment by officers and correctional staff working under them. Without surveillance, it is too easy to use impulsively. Anecdotal evidence suggests stun guns are deployed against people who lack political power in circumstances where officers are not really in danger. So we need to have more pictures generated, not fewer. And second, we need to be sure that everyone connected with the justice system is media literate – and the broader population as well.