Available via license: CC BY 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
Law & Society Review (2024), 58, 216–242
doi:10.1017/lsr.2024.16
ARTICLE
Recognizing “camera cues”: policing, cellphones
and citizen countersurveillance
Brandon Alston
Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Evanston, IL, USA
Email: Alston.113@osu.edu
I appreciate the generative feedback fromparticipants in t he Race and Society Workshop, Crime, Law, and
Society Workshop and the Culture and Society Workshop at Northwestern University. I am grateful for
the comments that I received from Northwestern faculty, who followed this project at various stages: Gary
Alan Fine, Wendy Griswold,John Hagan, Aldon Morris, Andrew Papachristos, Mary Pattillo, Robert Nelson,
Laura Beth Nielsen and Celeste Watkins-Hayes. I also value the thought-provoking insights prompted by
my colleagues at the American Bar Foundation, the Law and Society Review editors and the anonymous
reviewers. Please direct all correspondence to Brandon Alston, The Ohio State University, Department of
Sociology, Townshend Hall, 238, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210.
(Received 12 May 2020; revised 30 September 2022; accepted 20 January 2023)
Abstract
Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary
residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses pri-
marily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police
behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera,
how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing
on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this
study nds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret ocers’
words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as
signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facili-
tate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reecting
the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism.
Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize ocers’ outward displays and police–citizen
interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it pos-
sible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves
additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats,
and arrests.
Keywords: police misconduct; legal cynicism; legal consciousness; resistance; technologies
Introduction
“I CAN’T BREATHE” and the 2014 cellphone-generated video that exposed the
encounter in which police ocer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death now
stand as a striking reminder of the intrusive nature and interpretative impact that
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Law and Society Association.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 217
policing practices have on ordinary residents. Before Pantaleo targeted Garner for
selling individual cigarettes, cities like New York and Chicago legally authorized proac-
tive policing strategies that increased the frequency of encounters between police and
residents in areas city ocials identify as crime hotspots (Baumgartner et al. 2018;
Fagan et al. 2016; Skogan 2023). Disproportionately targeting Black men (Brunson 2007;
Duck 2017; Gau and Brunson 2015; Kirk and Papachristos 2011), these intrusive police
stops have prompted residents like Ramsey Orta to respond to the pervasive presence
of police by using their cellphones to record police behavior. As Orta recalled, his accu-
mulated knowledge of police behaviors informed his decision to record Garner’s nal
moments: “I always seen them cops doing something to somebody else, so I gured
I’d just record it” (emphasis added; Sanburn, 2015: 2). Like the residents who partici-
pated in this study, Orta exemplies how ordinary residents develop aspects of their
legal consciousness, commonsense understandings of the law and legal actors (Nielsen
2000; Sibley 2005), from past police contacts that inuence their future interpretations
and situated distrust of legal actors.
Amid the looming threat of police misconduct, research documents how orga-
nized activists attend formal training programs to learn how to use video equipment
to record police behaviors (Bock 2016; Bradshaw 2013; Huey et al. 2006; Wilson and
Serisier 2010). The ndings suggest that formal training programs serve as a site
where organized activists can revise and rene their legal consciousness to inter-
pret and anticipate police misconduct. For example, Stuart (2016b) observes that Black
male residents-turned-activists undergo intensive legal training to learn how to antic-
ipate police behaviors and capture misconduct on camera. Yet, ordinary residents
have generated some of the most notable videos of police misconduct, capturing the
nal fatal moments of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Philando Castile in
Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cellphone-
generated videos gathered by ordinary residents have also ignited the Black Lives
Matter (BLM) demonstrations for racial justice that amplied during 2020, even in the
face of the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given recent research and social
events, an important question remains: If formal programs train organized activists
to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when
they should record police behavior?
This article examines Black residents’ everyday exchanges with formal legal actors,
in this case, police ocers, as interactions that rene their “complex repertoire
of meanings” (Merry 1990: 5) about the law, specically police misconduct and the
racially discriminatory operations of law enforcement. Drawing on in-depth inter-
views with Black men living in a heavily policed neighborhood on the Southside
of Chicago, this article demonstrates that their legal consciousness includes socially
located ways of seeing and hearing formal legal actors and residents that facilitate
situated assessments of the legitimacy of legal authority. Through frequent police
encounters, residents learn to distill aspects of ocers’ outward displays as visually
and sonically signicant symbols of police misconduct (see Obasogie 2010; Schwarz
2015; Zerubavel 1999; and Mead and Schubert 1934 on signicant symbols). In subse-
quent exchanges, symbols serve as signals, or “camera cues,” that enable targeted vic-
tims and bystanders to capture cellphone recordings of police misconduct. However,
residents must often recognize and respond to camera cues while under legally autho-
rized surveillance and in confrontations with police ocers, at times experiencing
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
218 Brandon Alston
verbal and physical assaults and destruction of their property. The following anal-
ysis extends sociolegal research by bridging scholarship on legal cynicism and legal
consciousness to show how ordinary residents rely on situated interpretations when
deciding to distrust the police and document ocers’ behaviors.
Police misconduct, Black men and legal cynicism
American history and contemporary events provide ample evidence of the abu-
sive practices that police ocers have employed against Black men (Hinton 2021;
Muhammad 2010). At the turn of the twentieth century, the Chicago Police Department
relied on aggressive local law enforcement operations that disproportionately tar-
geted Black residents, which ignited local and national movements against police
misconduct (Balto 2019; Hinton 2021). Racial inequalities in police misconduct have
continued. In the late twentieth century, from 1972 through 1991, Chicago Commander
Jon Burge and several ocers, widely known as the “Midnight Crew,” used suocation,
shock and sexual abuse to extract confessions from over 100 Black men (Baer 2020;
Hagan et al. 2022; Ralph 2020). In 2015, the People’s Law Oce led a Reparations
Ordinance on behalf of 57 survivors of police torture. As a result, the Chicago City
Council agreed to a $5.5 million-dollar reparation settlement and a monument to
honor police torture survivors (Ralph 2020; Taylor 2019). Despite a recent public reck-
oning, the Department of Justice 2016 Patterns and Practices Report concluded that
Chicago police ocers continue to use excessive force with lethal outcomes that
violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights (Black 2017). The past and present
events involving intensied policing, torture tactics and police-involved shootings
exemplify the immensely fractured relationships between police ocers and Black
men.
Correspondingly, longstanding research consistently shows that legal cynicism, the
distrust of the law and formal legal actors, is a prevalent cultural orientation among
Black Americans (Hagan and Albonetti 1982; Muller and Schrage 2014). Although the
sources of legal cynicism are varied, they include “police violence, nonchalance, unre-
sponsiveness, racial bias, ineectiveness at ghting crime, and failure to arrest those
who have committed crimes” (Bell 2016: 319; see also Desmond et al. 2016; Kirk and
Papachristos 2011; and Sampson 2012). Extending these insights, Bell (2017) reori-
ents the theory of legal cynicism with “legal estrangement,” which interrogates the
collective and contextual conditions that inuence distrust. According to Bell (2017:
2054), legal estrangement is dened as “the intuition among many people in poor com-
munities of color that the law operates to exclude them from society.” Importantly,
legal estrangement theory describes how Black residents express a conicted desire
for police protection and suggests that distrust of legal actors is generalized and
situated.
Amid legal cynicism and estrangement, existing studies categorize a range of citizen
responses to interactions with legal actors. For example, Bell (2016) demonstrates the
situational conditions under which low-income Black mothers trust the police, indicat-
ing how residents develop localized perceptions of legal actors. While some residents
strategically trust the police, Werth (2012) nds that returning residents selectively
engage with parole ocers while negotiating reentry. Similarly, Clair (2021) also shows
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 219
that poor residents withdraw from legal ocials and actively cultivate lay legal knowl-
edge to resist the authority of their lawyers. Research can benet from analyzing how
residents negotiate their distrust of the broader legal system situationally to recognize
which police ocers are committed to misconduct rather than safety.
Microlevel accounts of interactions with police can also uncover more about the
situational dynamism of residents’ legal cynicism. Research shows that residents
establish trust in police based on “cues that communicate information about the
intentions and character” of police ocers (Jackson et al. 2012: 4). Thus, this study
conceptualizes camera cues as indicators that convey information that residents use
to judge whether they should distrust police and deploy their cellphones to document
misconduct. By examining residents’ interactions with police as a process wherein res-
idents learn to distill police behaviors into recognizable symbols associated with police
misconduct, this study extends this research by demonstrating how some outward
police displays trigger distrust among Black men. In these situations, distrust operates
as a cultural orientation to law enforcement that residents invoke based on their per-
tinent knowledge of police behavior, allowing residents to detect ocers’ intentions
based on their outward displays and perceivable actions (see Barbalet 2009; Chan and
Yao 2018; and Tyler and Huo 2002).
Proactive policing policies have also created recurring legal contacts where resi-
dents learn about the situational conditions under which they should distrust legal
actors. Proactive policing comprises “all policing strategies that have as one of
their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not
reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on inves-
tigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred” (National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018: 1). Police departments use “stop-and-frisk”
techniques as a proactive and person-focused crime-reduction strategy to detain,
interrogate and search citizens to detect and disrupt criminal activities and behav-
iors (Baumgartner et al. 2018; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine 2018). Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches,
the landmark Terry v. Ohio 1968 case established the “reasonable suspicion” standard
for police stops. Police disproportionately enact stop-and-frisk in low-income Black
communities – even after controlling for crime and other factors (Fagan et al. 2016). In
a recent Chicago survey, 40 percent of older Black men and 70 percent of younger Black
men reported being searched, threatened, handcued or injured by police (Skogan
2017;2023). Thus, for many Black men living in low-income urban neighborhoods, a
less restrictive legal threshold for police stops has created a constant threat of police
stopping and searching them. One prevalent consequence of police contact is “system
avoidance” or the tendency of individuals to avoid vital social institutions (Brayne
2014; Goman 2009). As a result, residents’ perceptions of current or future police
contact can inuence residents’ responses to subsequent legal interventions.
Scholarship on procedural justice also demonstrates that fairness in police encoun-
ters informs individuals’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the law. Procedural justice
refers to the process-based standards by which individuals evaluate whether police
ocers treat them with dignity and respect and perform without bias (Mazerolle et al.
2013; Tyler 2004). Findings show that Black residents disproportionately report nega-
tive personal and vicarious interactions with police that undermine their beliefs in the
legitimacy of the law and legal actors (Brunson 2007; Duck 2017; Fagan and Davies 2000;
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
220 Brandon Alston
Gau and Brunson 2015;2010; Kirk and Papachristos 2011; Meares et al. 2015; Tyler et al.
2014). While vicarious exposure is often minimized, vicarious experiences with police
can cause individuals to recognize themselves as dened by the social groups with
which they identify and enhance their perceptions of police ocers’ capacity for mis-
conduct (Bell 2017; Brunson 2007; Clay-Warner 2001; Jones-Brown 2000; Weitzer and
Tuch 2004). For example, highly publicized videos of police misconduct often align
with Black residents’ cumulative procedural injustices (Kwak et al. 2019). Merging legal
cynicism and procedural justice theories to foster deeper inquiries into residents’ per-
ceptions of police can reveal how residents develop situated cynical conceptions of
police and the illegitimacy of the law.
As researchers continue to examine Black residents’ relationships with legal actors,
it is important to understand how residents determine when to distrust them and
take resistant actions. Indeed, research has not focused on the discrete bits of sym-
bolic information that lead residents frequently exposed to police ocers to invoke
legal cynicism. While legal cynicism theory is rooted in racial and cultural con-
text, scholars have only provided nascent insights about the relationships between
legal consciousness and legal cynicism (see Young and Billings 2020). More empiri-
cal evidence and analytical work are necessary to connect legal cynicism and legal
consciousness. The present study emphasizes how Black male residents become
acculturated to identifying when a legal intervention is signicant because mis-
conduct is imminent. As building blocks of social life, the senses enable percep-
tion and require cultural tools to attribute meaning to sights and sounds (Bourdieu
1977; Simmel 1997). Thus, this study uses a micro-sociological approach to exam-
ine how Black men’s encounters with legal actors generate sensibilities, patterns of
meanings and anticipations and strategies of action (see Fine and Fields 2008 and
Merry 1990).
The sociolegal context of recording police misconduct
Recent sociolegal scholarship indicates that cultural sociology can provide additional
insights into police–citizen interactions by examining how individuals develop sys-
tems of meanings about legal actors (Bell 2016; Clair 2021; Stuart 2016a). Contemporary
cultural research employs a “cognitive view” (DiMaggio 1997) that conceptualizes
culture as an interactional product of information, schemas, the symbolic universe
and social interactions (Cerulo et al. 2021). This study focuses on how routine con-
tacts enable residents to acquire pertinent information about police ocers, which
inuences their subsequent sensory perceptions of police behaviors (see Lembo 2020
and Schwarz 2015). As Zerubavel (1999) establishes, interpretative frameworks l-
ter information obtained through the senses, and individuals learn to see the world
with an “optical style” informed by their social statuses and experiences (see Du Bois
([1903] 1990 on second sight and Young 2011). The senses help individuals identify
symbols (see Mead and Schubert 1934 and Simmel 1997). Symbols assist individuals
in interpreting their experiences by organizing relevant information (Eliasoph and
Lichterman 2003 and Swidler 1986). Thus, symbols are bound to past experiences and
facilitate future outcomes. Given that the subjective interpretation of human experi-
ence is critical for understanding human action (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Blumer
1969; Mead and Schubert 1934), this study incorporates cultural sociology with legal
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 221
consciousness research to understand how police contact inuences how Black male
residents tie situated sensory perceptions to ocers’ capacity for misconduct.
Legal consciousness scholarship decenters the formal law to examine how the law
invokes commonsense understandings of the law and legal actors that ordinary res-
idents can use to engage, avoid and resist the law (Chua and Engel 2019; Ewick and
Silbey 1998;2003; Nielsen 2000; Silbey 2005). One of the central messages of legal
consciousness literature is that ordinary residents’ resistance to the law requires a
consciousness of how legality establishes unjust distributions of power (Ewick and
Silbey 1998;2003). Through this lens, police ocers operate as legal superordinates,
while ordinary residents serve as legal subordinates who can craft openings to resist
legal hegemony (Ewick and Silbey 1998;2003). In Ewick and Silbey’s (1998)The Common
Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life, they reveal that some people view themselves
“against the law” and engage in resistant acts “using what the situation …makes
available—materially and discursively—to fashion solutions” (49). For example, Young
(2014) nds that some people use other people’s observations or “second-order legal
consciousness” to cultivate legal knowledge about police practices. As police mete
out treatment based on racial and gendered status (Remster et al. 2022), they signif-
icantly increase Black men’s opportunities to build a commonsense understanding
of legal actors. This study extends legal consciousness scholarship by emphasizing
personal and vicarious experiences and racialized enforcement of the law as inte-
gral factors in how Black male residents build commonplace understandings of legal
actors that “become[s] synthesized into a set of circulating, often taken-for-granted
understandings, and habits” (Silbey 2005: 324).
Police ocers hold the power to impose race, as a set of cultural meanings and
experiences, onto Black residents through social interactions (see Browne 2015 on
racializing surveillance). In turn, police reinforce racializing experiences, such as Black
men’s heightened risk of involuntary police contact and police violence (Rojek et al.
2012; Voigt et al. 2017). Police violence, like domestic violence, is an institutionalized
tactic that attacks the weak through repetitive patterns in which antagonists, tar-
geted victims and bystanders become accustomed to acting out their roles and using
resources for self-preservation (Campbell et al. 1998; Collins 2009). In this way, police
ocers are an instrument in the (re)production of racialized social control as they
dictate who lives and dies (Mbembe 2019). As Mills (2014) notes, “The coercive arms
of the state …the police …need to be seen as …working both to keep the peace and
prevent crime among the white citizens, and to maintain the racial order and detect
and destroy challenges to it. …” (84). Thus, the racialized operation of law enforce-
ment can promote distrust among Black residents who often doubt that police ocers’
behaviors are eorts to meet communities’ safety needs (Brunson 2007).
Within the racialized operation of law enforcement, police contact is an interac-
tional site where Black residents can mutually construct legal and racial consciousness
(see Webb 2017). Police contact, experienced personally and vicariously, is a social pro-
cess through which Black residents develop ideas about their racial positioning in the
legal system. The Theory of Double Consciousness provides a theoretical grounding to
understand how police ocers inuence Black residents’ modes of sensory perception
(Du Bois [1903] 1990). Du Bois ([1903] 1990) argues that Black people develop con-
sciousness from racialized personal and vicarious experiences, some of which include
recognizing how the American criminal legal system functions as a racialized system of
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
222 Brandon Alston
social control or a “double system of justice.” As observed in the present study, the fre-
quency of legal contact provides Black men with insights into how racial status informs
access to justice and forces them to acknowledge themselves and others as dened
by the racial groups they inhabit (see Hegtvedt 2005). Accordingly, residents mutu-
ally construct their racial and legal consciousness through racialized personal and
vicarious experiences. Racial status represents a distinctive set of relationships within
the legal system that inuences forms of legal consciousness that are simultaneously
gendered, classed and inected by other statuses.
In communities with inadequate police protection, residents develop a legal con-
sciousness oriented toward “self-help” actions that require the identication of sym-
bols to anticipate threatening situations and avoid victimization (Anderson 1990;
Stuart 2016b; see Black 1983). Specically, Anderson (1990) observes that urban res-
idents cultivate an indigenous interpretative framework of “street wisdom” that
“allows one to ‘see-through’ public situations, to anticipate what is about to happen
based on cues and signals ….” (5). Crucially, Anderson (1990) identies how street-wise
residents become accustomed to the elements of their neighborhood, including police
ocers and their residents. Similarly, Stuart (2016a;2016b) develops “cop wisdom” to
describe how residents process information and recognize available options to pre-
dict police activities to evade police contact. This study extends these inquiries by
examining how residents conduct situated interpretations of police–citizen interac-
tions based on discrete bits of symbolic information residents gain from exposure to
police ocers.
Despite the social prevalence of ordinary residents’ cellphone recording of police
behaviors, ordinary residents are noticeably absent from the empirical research on
citizens’ use of cellphones and other recording technologies (Søgaard et al. 2023).
Research documents how organized activists use recording technologies to expose
police misconduct, support fair investigations and protect their and others’ lives
from injury and death (Richardson 2020; Sandhu 2016; Sandhu and Haggerty 2017;
Stuart 2016b). Formal training programs help organized activists learn how to engage
in “countersurveillance,” the deliberate and strategic uses of technologies to chal-
lenge institutionalized watchers and power asymmetries (Huey et al. 2006; Marx 2003;
Monahan 2006). Yet, some scholars suggest that citizens recording of police conduct
operates as a form of “sousveillance” – the recording by an individual without institu-
tional power of an event in which they are a participant to document the behavior of
entities with institutional authority (Mann and Ferenbok 2013). The ordinary residents
in this study, however, demonstrate how their exposure to police conduct becomes a
process that informs them of police ocers’ behavioral tendencies and allows them
to deploy their cellphones in response to ocers’ conduct. This study intervenes in
debates over the relationship between countersurveillance and sousveillance to show
how ordinary residents use cellphones as a counterresponse to police that they enact
under the gaze of legally authorized police surveillance.
Several technological innovations, social organizations and sociolegal changes have
also created a political and cultural context that enables and constrains American
citizens’ perceptions and use of cellphones as a resource to contest legal author-
ity and resolve legal conicts (Richardson 2020; Stuart 2016b). Recent advancements
in cellphone technology have transformed the gathering and sharing of visual data
and information with varying reception by formal legal institutions and actors
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 223
(Brayne et al. 2018; Goldsmith 2010; Stuart 2016b). According to a 2021 report
by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of African Americans own smartphones.
Another survey study nds that 67 percent of Americans who own smartphones
use them to “share photos, videos, or commentary about events happening in their
community” (Smith 2015). At the same time, social organizations are increasingly
inuencing a renewed legal landscape to protect citizens during interactions with
police ocers. BLM organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
encourage citizens to use cellphones to broadcast their interactions with police
ocers.
The law on the books in the United States and Illinois has also inuenced how cit-
izens perceive and deploy cellphones when interacting with legal actors. Adhering to
the Fourth Amendment, most United States jurisdictions safeguard individual privacy
through laws that prohibit eavesdropping (Gibson 2015). Illinois’s eavesdropping law,
one of the nation’s strictest, previously stipulated that an individual who obtains “all-
party consent” can legally record events (Freivogel 2011; Whitson 2014). For example,
Illinois residents once faced 15 years of imprisonment if a recorded party was an on-
duty police ocer. In ACLU of Illinois v. Alvarez, a case that emerged from the ACLU’s
police accountability program, the Seventh Circuit court’s decision restricted the
scope of Illinois’s eavesdropping law: the “eavesdropping statute does in fact ‘restrict
a medium of expression’—the use of a common instrument of communication—and
thus an integral step in the speech process” (Whitson 2014: 206). In 2014, the Illinois
Supreme Court held that the eavesdropping law was unconstitutional because it
“burden[ed] substantially more speech than is necessary to serve a legitimate state
interest in protecting conversational privacy” (Gibson 2015: 23). At the end of 2014,
then-Governor Pat Quinn signed into law Senate Bill 1342, which amended and rein-
stituted a criminal eavesdropping law in Illinois, but it forbade only the recording of
private conversations. Since then, Illinois’s legal decisions have established an insti-
tutional foundation for allowing citizens to legally capture audiovisual recordings
of police in public settings where they do not maintain a reasonable expectation of
privacy.
With all of these insights, this article asks: If formal programs train organized
activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents deter-
mine when they should record police behavior? Black men living in the Englewood
neighborhood of Chicago provide ideal case studies to examine how police contact
inuences how ordinary residents determine to record police encounters with their
cellphones. Following a description of the setting and methodological approach, the
ndings analyze police contact as a social process through which residents develop
patterns of perception of ocers’ capacity for police misconduct. The analysis empha-
sizes the similarities and distinctions between personal and vicarious police exposure
and the legal knowledge these experiences generate. By examining the experiences
of targeted victims and bystanders, the following pages indicate how recurrent police
interactions enable citizens to generate memory-maintained expectations that past
patterns will repeat in subsequent interactions. The conclusion discusses the impli-
cations of resident recordings of police, oers theoretical interventions for legal
cynicism and legal consciousness scholarship and presents evidence regarding camera
cues in other communities beyond the study setting.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
224 Brandon Alston
Setting and methods
The following analysis focuses on moments when Black men deploy their cellphones
when interacting with police. Respondents were drawn from the Englewood neighbor-
hood of Chicago to understand how frequent police contact impacts low-income Black
men. Englewood occupies a three-square-mile area on the Southside of Chicago and is
home to approximately 24,369 residents. The 2021 Community Data Snapshot reports
that Englewood’s population is 95 percent Black, 55 percent earn less than $25,000
annually and 25 percent are unemployed. Although Englewood residents live through
digital disadvantages, 74 percent maintain access to one or more computing devices,
and 18 percent own or have access to smartphones only (Chicago Metropolitan Agency
for Planning 2021). Media outlets also regard Englewood as one of Chicago’s neighbor-
hoods with a high incidence of crime (Pollard 2015). For example, during the rst year
of data collection, 2017, there were 48 criminal homicides, 601 robberies and 1,169
aggravated assault-and-battery incidents. The Englewood neighborhood of Chicago
also remains a consistent site for police misconduct and unwarranted criminalization.
In 1994, police tortured four Black male teenagers, now known as the “Englewood
Four,” into falsely confessing to a rape and murder of a woman. In 2017, DNA evi-
dence and supporting testimony from a former prosecutor on the case exonerated
these (now adult) men, and they later received a $31 million settlement for wrongful
imprisonment (Browne 2019).
Englewood was also previously home to the proactive policing policy “Operation
Impact,” which concentrated ocers in Chicago neighborhoods that city ocials
identied as high crime. Following the suspension of Operation Impact, the Chicago
Police Department renewed its public commitment to community policing. However,
the Chicago Police Department faced widespread criticism when police dash camera
footage showed Ocer Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-
old young Black man, sixteen times. The footage previously concealed by then-
superintendent Garry McCarthy prompted the Department of Justice to conduct a civil
rights investigation, which concluded that the CPD had engaged in a “pattern of civil
rights violations” (The United States Justice Department, 2017). In 2016, then-Mayor
Rahm Emanuel and newly appointed Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson hired addi-
tional police ocers and increased the CPD’s budget to $4 billion over 3 years (Vargas
et al. 2020). Emanuel later agreed to a consent decree on behalf of the City of Chicago
and revised the police department’s use-of-force policy. Similar conditions have con-
tinued under the administration of Police Superintendent David Brown and Mayor Lori
Lightfoot. Despite policy revisions and police reforms, police contact remains a com-
mon experience among Black residents who live on Chicago’s South and West sides
(Skogan 2023; Vargas et al. 2020).
This study draws from a sample of 27 in-depth, semi-structured interviews con-
ducted with 23 low-income Black men who resided and received services in Englewood
and had recorded police behavior.1Data collection took place in 2017, 2018 and
2021. The data-collection period included several critical moments, particularly before
and after the day in Minneapolis when Darnella Frazier captured then-Ocer Derek
Chauvin on her cellphone, suocating George Floyd to death. Throughout data collec-
tion, I relied on purposive sampling, where I recruited Black men who had interacted
with police and focused on a subset of participants who had recorded police behaviors.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 225
To assess their socioeconomic status, respondents self-identied as “low-income” dur-
ing the interview and oered income estimates through a demographic questionnaire.
The sample focuses on low-income Black men to examine the racial, gendered and
classed group whose members are disproportionately likely to be arrested, incarcer-
ated and suer from police violence (Kramer and Remster 2018; Rojek et al. 2012;
Voigt et al. 2017). This sample includes ve men who received services in Englewood
and recorded police behavior, providing some evidence that the patterns identied
in this study exist for ordinary residents who live in other Chicago neighborhoods.
Respondents’ ages in this sample ranged from 18 to 56 years. The age gradation coin-
cides with those in existing survey reports, indicating that older Black men continue
to disproportionately experience investigative police searches (Skogan 2017;2023).
I refer to the Black men in this study primarily as “ordinary residents” to underscore
that their neighborhood is a principal location of the surveillance they experience.
I also use “ordinary” to emphasize that these men are not organized activists or
legal professionals but residents who experienced and witnessed police contact while
navigating their city and neighborhood.
To be included in each phase of the study, individuals had to live or receive ser-
vices in Englewood, identify as Black men and hold American citizenship. During
the rst phase, I interviewed men about their perceptions of police and police tech-
nologies, strategies for navigating police surveillance and decisions to record police
interventions. I recruited respondents in public spaces by asking prospective partici-
pants: “Would you like to participate in a study about your experiences with police in
Englewood?” These interviews took place in private meeting rooms in a coee shop
and a local grocery store. In the second and third data-collection phases, participants
qualied for this study based on previous requirements, living and receiving services
in Englewood and prior incarceration in jails or prisons. In the second phase, I used a
private oce and a coee shop to conduct two follow-up interviews with two residents
from phase one who had recorded police behavior and interviewed additional partic-
ipants who participated in a local community organization. During the third phase,
I recruited residents by distributing yers at local shops and community organizations.
I conducted interviews via a password-protected Zoom room and others in a private
room at a local church. I also conducted two follow-up interviews with one participant
who recorded police behavior.
The interviews were digitally recorded and ranged from 60 to 180 minutes. I gen-
erated eld notes about each respondent after each interview, and all interviews were
transcribed verbatim. My racial and gendered statuses as a Black man enhanced my
rapport with participants throughout the data-collection process. In particular, sev-
eral participants explained that our shared statuses encouraged them to participate
in the study. I assigned each participant a pseudonym and omitted the names of street
locations to protect their privacy. However, I use the neighborhood’s actual name for
fact-checking and replication purposes. The quotations are verbatim constructions of
participants’ expressions, while I use italics and capitalization to draw attention to
vital portions of residents’ descriptions.
The semi-structured interview guide enabled me to probe the topic of cell-
phone recording and adapt to each resident’s specic experiences. During interviews,
residents answered questions about their direct interactions with police, vicarious
interactions with police, the factors they considered when interacting with police,
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
226 Brandon Alston
experiences associated with recording police conduct, ocers’ reactions to being
recorded and awareness of the legality of recording police behavior. Residents reported
dozens of police encounters and instances of vicarious exposure to high-prole videos
of police violence, specically those involving Laquan McDonald and Eric Garner, and
local videos they accessed through YouTube and Facebook. After listening to audio
recordings and reading transcripts, I engaged in descriptive coding to categorize sit-
uations where residents used their cellphones. I examined each case of cellphone
recording, coded for situational dynamics and consulted relevant literature, repeating
this process while relying on inductive and abductive reasoning (Glaser and Strauss
1967; Timmermans and Tavory 2012). I returned to transcripts to juxtapose situations
where residents recorded police conduct with their past experiences with police. This
analytical approach oered the distinct advantage of allowing me to trace situational
similarities and dierences to examine how residents determine when to deploy their
cellphones.
Learning to interpret and anticipate police behaviors
For many Black men living in low-income urban neighborhoods, the prevalence
of police contact has made police searches operate as a set of patterned interac-
tions they understand and are accustomed to repeating ( Jones 2018). For example,
one of the residents with whom I became acquainted, Greg, a 36-year-old resident,
described police contact as routine and racialized: “I have many encounters with
them [the police], that happen all the time in Englewood. You get frisked just because
you look Black.” Regular exposure to the police has enabled residents like Greg
to develop socially located ways of sensing and interpreting police–citizen inter-
actions, thereby facilitating their anticipation of police misconduct during future
encounters (see Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). Residents learned which ocers’ words
and actions preceded and accompanied police misconduct through personal expe-
riences with police misconduct and vicarious experiences with police mistreatment
of others. With each personal and vicarious police exposure point, residents acquire
pertinent legal knowledge about the situational dynamics of police misconduct,
allowing them to determine when to distrust police and consider ocers illegiti-
mate (see Gau 2011). As a result, residents built a legal consciousness reective of
the racialized operation of law enforcement. As such, residents learned to inter-
pret and anticipate police ocers’ behaviors as symbols that represented what
police ocers were likely to do next and later served as signals for recording police
behavior.
Among the symbolic information residents acquired from police encounters, some
residents learned to interpret ocers’ words and verbal expressions as indicators of
their capacity for misconduct. Craig, a 29-year-old resident, endured routine inter-
actions with police throughout his adolescence that persisted once he departed a
juvenile facility with a criminal record. As a result, Craig insisted: “I see [the] police
every day since I been growin’ up.” With each successive police interaction, Craig has
attuned his legal consciousness and developed a socially located way of identifying
unjust police ocers’ behaviors. On one occasion, while walking home from work,
Craig recalled running into police: “I …see police [and hear them say] ‘bring your
little dumb ass here’ …and now I know you, one of them petty ocers.” While police
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 227
subjected Craig to intense scrutiny while he engaged in an innocuous behavior, this
encounter helped Craig learn how to interpret ocers’ verbal expressions to deter-
mine the type of police ocer before him. According to Craig, these types of police
interactions helped him become more aware of how police ocers and community
members operate as sources of surveillance:
It just made me wiser. It made me think no matter what you [are] doing,
somebody [is] watching you. You ain’t just being watched by stickups, rob-
bers, or killers, [and] you being watched by the police. It made me alert like a
motherfucker.
In Craig’s words, the threat of police misconduct made his situated inspection of police
behaviors necessary: “Cause like they don’t do they job. Most of ‘em don’t care. Why
[do] you think police out here killing innocent people?” Past experiences with police
showed Craig the utility of interpreting police ocers’ verbal expressions as evidence
of their likelihood to treat harmless behaviors as harmful.
Through frequent contact with police, residents accessed legal knowledge about
when ocers will act unfairly and are likely to become violent. Ace, a 26-year-old
resident, rmly believed that police ocers scrutinized him because of his dread-
locked hair and clothing centering his Black identity. In Ace’s words, he observed
police consistently “picking on people for no reason” and witnessed how police specif-
ically mistreated Black people. In light of these experiences, Ace learned to direct his
attention toward how police approach him to determine whether they will become
violent:
First impressions are a lasting impression. First impressions got a lot to do with
it. So, it all just depends on the ocer and how he come[s] at me. And really, I
got a good sense of energy, so I pay attention to his energy, his body language
like if he [is] gonna be aggressive or anything. I’ma know because I’ma see it.
Signicantly, Ace described how he focuses on how ocers treat him and “sensing”
their energy through their outward displays, an interpretative ability he cultivated
through his interactions with the police. For example, during a recent trac stop, Ace
initially perceived the ocer as approaching his vehicle in a hostile manner: “The
police pulled me over and came up aggressively to the van and was like: ‘hand me
your license and registration and roll down those windows, you got all those people
in the car …ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW.”’ After an emotionally charged exchange,
Ace received a warning from the ocer. From this experience and others, Ace has
generated vital legal knowledge that rened his legal consciousness and enabled him
to interpret police ocers’ behavioral tendencies as symbols that forecast ocers’
propensity for enacting unwarranted violence.
Routine police contact has been central in shaping how longstanding residents
acquired legal knowledge about police ocers across multiple junctures and contex-
tual conditions. Silas, a 56-year-old resident, experienced his rst police stop at 8 years
of age and has interacted frequently with police ever since. When Silas matured,
he faced several personal hardships that led to substance abuse and retail theft to
support his habit. During this time, he often confronted police who denigrated him
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
228 Brandon Alston
through racially marked verbal abuses. These accumulated interactions with police
inuenced Silas’s interpretation of ocers’ racial backgrounds, words and subtle
actions as multilayered symbols of police misconduct. Indicating how these symbols
of police behavior become an embodied feeling that represents how police will behave
in future interactions, Silas remarked:
Well, if I see a Black cop and he’s with another Black cop as his partner, I feel
kinda cool about it. Because he don’t have no intention on hurting his brother,
that’s not the thought in they head. But you can look at some white cops as they
drive past you and look at you and probably turn and say something to his buddy.
They use the n-word to address what they see within you. ‘Look at this nigger,’
you can just feel it. ‘What do you think this nigger got on him? I betcha he got
something illegal on him.’
As Silas distinguished between white and Black cops, he invoked racialized group stan-
dards to understand dierential patterns of law enforcement. Although research casts
some doubt on the idea that Black ocers perform police work more eectively for
Black residents (Brunson and Gau 2015), he believed that white ocers are more likely
to harm Black people. Silas used past police contacts as legal knowledge to inter-
pret ocers’ racial backgrounds and identify ocers likely to engage in misconduct,
thereby situationally distrusting ocers’ based on their perceivable actions.
In the rapidly expanding digital archive of videos depicting police–citizen inter-
actions, residents often encountered other people’s experiences with the police.
Vicarious police contact also contributed to how residents learn to sense and discern
when an ocer’s actions will likely precede police misconduct. Online videos exposed
residents to other people’s experiences with and perceptions of police ocers and
enabled residents to associate meanings with outcomes of police misconduct, thereby
building their second-order legal consciousness (see Young 2014). Juan, a 26-year-old
resident, watched a video on Facebook showing police harassing members aliated
with New Era Chicago, a local community organization. According to Juan, this video
revealed to him how police unfairly target New Era Chicago members:
Last year, in April, they had a video, and they had just got done picking up trash
in the neighborhood. So, they were ending the day doing chants. Of course, the
police showed up and started fucking with ‘em. You see them throwing down
15-year-old boys, pushing women and old men in the group. And I was like, every
time they out here, the cops want to fuck with them (emphasis added).
By viewing this local video about police, Juan acquired legal knowledge of relationships
between members aliated with a local community group and law enforcement. The
video provided Juan with visual access to police–citizen interactions, allowing him to
replay these exchanges to learn to recognize repetitive patterns of police misconduct
and violence (see Collins 2009). However, as Juan watched this video, he experienced a
marginalizing eect of policing based on his racial and residential connections to the
targeted victims in the video. While this video and corresponding comments served
as a digital source of trauma, it also contained and conveyed symbolic messages that
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 229
primed Juan to distrust police ocers when they interacted with this local community
group subsequently.
In the context of frequent police exposure and the threat of police misconduct, res-
idents used personal and vicarious experiences to decipher police interactions into
recognizable symbols. During each police interaction, residents learned and stored
legal knowledge that expanded their cultural orientations to the law by associating
specic verbal and nonverbal communications with police misconduct. As a result,
residents constructed a legal consciousness, deeply inected by the racialized oper-
ation of law enforcement, encompassing a socially located way to interpret whether
legal actors are helpful or harmful. Like residents in other communities who culti-
vated localized interpretations of police and citizens (Anderson 1990; Bell 2016; Stuart
2016a), Englewood residents acquired symbolic information about police ocers that
inuenced how they determined to distrust police and use cellphones to record police
behavior in subsequent interactions.
Recognizing camera cues
Drawing on legal knowledge learned from their experiences with police, residents
identied symbols of police misconduct in tandem with cellphones that subsequently
served as signals, or what I term “camera cues,” that they should record specic
encounters with police. During routine interactions with police, residents acquired,
stored and later retrieved pertinent legal knowledge about ocers’ behaviors that
enabled the residents to adjust their subsequent responses. Past experiences served
as examples of future outcomes, which allowed residents to tie somatic sensations
to police misconduct. While interacting with police, some residents overheard o-
cers’ words and tone of voice, some observed ocers’ actions and gestures and others
observed and overheard police. Although residents’ interpretative approaches dif-
fered regarding the senses employed and the signals perceived, the corresponding
impressions guided similar patterns of action with cellphones.
Camera cues operated as stores of localized knowledge of preceding events involv-
ing police misconduct, wherein residents are targeted victims and bystanders (see
Collins 2009). While these roles entailed distinct standpoints in these social inter-
actions, bystanders who recorded police were often targeted by police, becoming
victims who experienced coercion, verbal threats, destruction of property and physi-
cal assaults. During personal interactions, targeted victims employed interpretations
of police conduct to assess whether recording the police was necessary for self-help
and self-protection (see Black 1983 and Gau and Brunson 2015). For a bystander, a
symbol became a signal for action based on their situated assessment of other citi-
zens and police ocers, communicating how bystanders understand that racialized
group standards are involved when individuals negotiate access to procedural jus-
tice (see Hegtvedt 2005). Bystanders selected police interactions to record, reecting
and reinforcing social ties between bystanders and targeted victims. Across varying
standpoints and situations, residents perceived ocers’ words and actions as situa-
tional factors that revealed the process through which routine police stops escalated
to recording-worthy events. Table 1 provides an in-depth layout indicating the con-
textual conditions under which some of the residents in this study use camera cues
and pertinent knowledge alongside the situational outcomes of recording the police.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
230 Brandon Alston
Table 1. Contextual conditions, camera cues, pertinent knowledge and situational outcomes
Contextual
conditions Camera cues Pertinent knowledge Situational outcomes
Bystander,
Street Stop
Police assert threats
to shoot coupled
with obscenities.
Craig knew that his
neighbor participated in
the underground drug
economy. From past expe-
riences, Craig learned
to treat ofcers’ words
as evidence of their
intentions.
Craig created a video
and saved it on his
phone to send to his
neighbor.
Bystander,
Trafc Stop
Police issue
discouraging
directives.
From personal and vicar-
ious exposure to police,
Mason learned that police
in Bloomington engage
in a pattern of racialized
stops against Black peo-
ple, particularly in Black
neighborhoods.
Mason accepted a
thank you from the
Black man whom the
police stopped and
offered to send him
the video.
Bystander,
Street Raid
Police generate
“boom, boom”
noises when using
hoses lled with
mace.
Joel learned to attribute
loud sounds to police,
informed by his expe-
rience with police
discharging their weapons
during a home raid.
Joel distributed the
video via Facebook
and sent it to media
outlets and Chicago
politicians. Joel never
learned about any
actions taken against
the police ofcers in
the video.
Bystander,
Street Stop
Police argue with
citizens whose
relative was
murdered.
Owen previously experi-
enced several interactions
with police where of-
cers verbally disrespected
him and subjected him to
invasive public searches.
Owen saved the
video on his phone
and offered to send it
to his neighbors.
Bystander,
Trafc Stop
Police stop a Black
man because of his
tinted windows.
Through frequent police
contacts, Jordan learned
that ofcers’ body lan-
guage forecasts whether
they are just or unjust.
Police destroyed
Jordan’s phone.
Jordan learned that
to record police
as a bystander, he
must maintain a safe
distance to avoid
becoming a targeted
victim.
Targeted
Victim,
Street Stop
Police deploy
weapons at the
onset of a street
stop.
Given his background
with numerous police
raids while growing up
in Chicago public hous-
ing, Kaleb believed that
when ofcers begin a
search with their rearms,
violence is imminent.
Police destroyed both
of Kaleb’s phones,
arrested him, charged
him, and he spent
5 months in Cook
County jail and a
month in Statesville
prison.As a single
father and custodial
parent, the police sent
his son to the Illinois
Department of Child
and Family Services.
(Continued)
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 231
Table 1. (Continued.)
Contextual
conditions Camera cues Pertinent knowledge Situational outcomes
Targeted
Victim;
Trafc Stop
Police invade Ace’s
personal space and
issue directives in
an elevated tone of
voice.
Past exposure to police
through personal and
vicarious contacts has
taught Ace that ofcers’
words and actions, par-
ticularly their initial body
language, reect their
likelihood of becoming
violent.
Ace survived a
threatening police
intervention and
noticed that the of-
cer’s demeanor and
behavior shifted when
he recorded him.
Bystander,
Street Stop
Police accuse a local
community group of
wielding guns.
Juan recalled watching a
video on Facebook where
police harassed New Era
Chicago, a Black com-
munity group focused
on advancing safety in
Englewood. From this
experience, Juan con-
cluded that police unfairly
target New Era Chicago.
Juan observed of-
cers call for backup.
He also witnessed a
lieutenant arrive, who
determined the of-
cers had insufcient
evidence for an arrest
or property seizure.
Bystander,
Trafc Stop
Three white of-
cers conduct an
invasive search of
young Black men
in an elevated tone
while issuing verbal
commands.
Silas learned from past
experiences that white
ofcers who shout when
issuing directives are
likely involved in police
misconduct.
Silas heard one of-
cer demand that
he stop recording
the events as they
unfolded.According
to Silas, the ofcers
also threatened him
with physical vio-
lence if he did not
stop recording this
encounter.
This article demonstrates that one way to assess Black men’s relationships with
police is by examining the contextual conditions under which they deploy their
cellphones to take action against the police. In some situations, ocers’ outward dis-
plays assured residents that police were conducting legally appropriateinterventions
(Jackson et al. 2012; Tyler and Huo 2002). In situations where ocers’ outward displays
prevented residents’ assurance, residents turned to their senses as a source of cultural
interpretation, accessed pertinent knowledge and used their cellphones to create an
alternative measure of assurance. For example, Josiah, a 20-year-old, emphasized that
ocers’ tonal displays stimulated his awareness of police misconduct: “The tone of
voice, if they’re rude or not, if they come o arrogant, ‘cause most cops that come o
arrogant are going to end up being rude again or acting like you’re less than them, so
I’d always be ready [to record]. Just in case.” Thus, Josiah’s distrust emerged when he
used situated assessments of ocers’ behaviors as evidence of which police ocers
were most likely to mistreat him.
Police interventions unfolded quickly, and residents used previous experiences and
knowledge to analyze and anticipate ocers’ verbal and nonverbal behaviors (see
Singh 2017 and Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). Kevin, a 42-year-old resident, explained
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
232 Brandon Alston
how his interpretation of police treatment mediated cellphone recording of police
behavior: “more and more the police harass[ing] me made being cautious to do so. If
he harassing me, I’ll be prepared to record. I feel comfortable recording for future refer-
ence. It’s just in case they prepare criminal acts against us in the community” (emphasis
added). Like Kevin, many residents deployed their cellphones strategically based on
situational appraisals that conveyed when visual evidence was needed to document
police misconduct. Consequently, residents’ cellphone recording added another layer
of scrutiny of police that could constrain ocers’ discretionary authority. Yet, some
ocers conscated cellphones when they observed residents recording them, in some
cases even unlawfully destroying the phones or arresting citizens who recorded their
conduct (Wall and Linnemann 2014). Other police ocers, however, adjusted their
tones, language and actions (Sandhu 2016).
Hearing police: words, statements and tones
Past experiences with police served as templates for future interactions, allowing resi-
dents to tie ocers’ word choices to impending misconduct. When ocers repeatedly
threatened physical violence accompanied with obscene language, Craig used o-
cers’ statements as evidence that unnecessary force was imminent and recorded the
encounter. In this instance, after the police arrived on the scene, Craig heard ocers
“makin’ it seem like they was gonna shoot. They were like ‘bring your ass out here
before I shoot.’ That’s when I got to recordin’.” While Craig acknowledged that his
neighbor sold drugs, he still believed at the time that the threat that ocers would
injure the neighbor constituted a rationale for deploying his cellphone. This strate-
gic way of hearing police enabled Craig to prepare for a future where ocers take
violent action against his neighbor: “And I’m like let me record this shit just in case
…this [police ocer] do shoot them.” Informed by previous experiences with police
who issue verbal threats before they use unnecessary force, Craig deciphered ocers’
word choices to indicate their capacity for violence.
The legal knowledge residents accumulated through frequent exposure to police
behavior also extended to interactions with police outside the Englewood neigh-
borhood. Mason, a 52-year-old resident, recorded police while visiting his relatives
in Bloomington, Illinois. Despite contextual dierences, Mason emphasized that
Bloomington police operate like Chicago ocers: “Police was getting away with a
lot of shit down there in Bloomington too. The trac stops, man, they was lock-
ing them up. Bloomington’s just like a little Chicago anyway. And they was only
doing that in the Black neighborhoods. They wasn’t stopping the white folks.” With
this knowledge in mind, Mason heard police ocers issue discouraging directives
to prevent him from witnessing their behavior when they stopped another Black
man. Rather than remaining passive in the face of what he believed was a bla-
tant law enforcement violation, Mason resisted ocers’ directives and recorded the
encounter:
The dude [ocer] was telling me, keep it moving, you ain’t nothing to do with
this, this ain’t none of your business. And was kind of like, in the street, so I got
up on the sidewalk. I said it’s not against the law to use my phone for evidence, to
make sure this brother …you all don’t do nothing crazy. And then a lot of people
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 233
started joining in too. So they tore his car up, looking for drugs. And they ain’t
nd nothing, so they let him go. But see, just that type of harassment, tearing
his shit up. If we had the type of connections and money that white folks have,
they wouldn’t even do that.
Mason used ocers’ verbal communications to make deductions that connected the
incident with a broader socio-legal context where Black citizens are the recipients
of additional legal burdens. Ocers’ attempts to deter Mason from witnessing the
search activated his distrust and led him to anticipate police misconduct and deploy
his cellphone to capture an ocer physically assaulting a Black man.
Policing has also created unique sounds in urban neighborhoods, including noise
from helicopters and rearms that residents became accustomed to experiencing and
interpreting (see Goman 2009). Joel, a 56-year-old resident, witnessed the police raid
a home in Englewood. The ocers deployed their rearms from the onset of the inci-
dent. Joel has learned to associate ocers’ abusive practices with specic sounds: “The
police engaged those people by ring shots at the …. It was an apartment building,
and they just started shooting, pow, pow, pow.” Subsequently, during a 2020 protest
in Englewood, Joel recalled: “I heard these loud booms, ‘Boom, boom.”’ Joel attributed
sonic signicance to the “boom, boom, boom.” By following these sounds, Joel suc-
cessfully recorded police using hoses lled with mace to disrupt a peaceful protest
against police violence: “And when I got down there, I seen they had these long rods
and they was just spraying mace on anybody. Yes, I recorded that.” Police ocers’ use
of mace-lled hoses is consistent with how police have amplied their responses to
protest generally. However, such a response is particularly likely to occur when the
threat of Black insurrection looms (Passavant 2021). Joel’s interpretation of specic
sounds caused by police interventions enabled him to document evidence of what he
considered police misconduct.
Seeing police: actions, behaviors and gestures
Residents also relied on another sensory mechanism to recognize camera cues:
observation. Owen, a 44-year-old resident, witnessed police conduct violent searches
that informed how he processed police conduct visually. Based on these experi-
ences, Owen believed that police often go out of their way to denigrate Black people.
Following the widespread public disapproval of footage showing Laquan McDonald’s
fatal nal moments, Owen recognized a renewed utility in recording police. During one
encounter, Owen observed ocers prevent family members from entering the scene
of a shooting that resulted in a young man’s death. Owen realized that the ocers’
conduct deviated from the type of treatment that shooting victims and their relatives
should receive:
Me seeing the hurt and the pain of the people who found out their loved ones
[were] lost. How they are trying to run up in the store like that, and the police
pushed them o. …There was a shooting down at Harold’s before Harold’s
closed. [The police] were down there. They got in an argument with the police,
and I thought I better put this on record. It might turn ugly.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
234 Brandon Alston
In seeing ocers use force against residents mourning the loss of a family mem-
ber, Owen deployed his cellphone based on identifying his neighbors’ relative
powerlessness and the ocers’ unwarranted response. As a bystander observing a
scene, Owen used his vision to interpret both the grieving residents and the ocers
to document a potentially harmful situation with his cellphone.
Bystanders who recorded police risk becoming targeted victims, thereby experi-
encing the police violence and abuses they intended to prevent. As police stopped
another Black man, Jordan, a 47-year-old man, combined his legal knowledge with
an interpretation of the situation to determine when to deploy his cellphone: “One
time we pulled up at a gas station, and the police just pulled up on one dude because
he got tinted windows. I don’t feel that there was no reason for him and pull up, so
I started recording him.” In light of his previous experiences, Jordan surmised that
this trac stop was a display of power and legal violation rather than an attempt to
achieve neighborhood safety: “…gured he’s going to do something to violate this
man’s constitutional rights …. It was more of ‘I’m in control ….’ He was down on the
young man.” Jordan used his cellphone to challenge asymmetrical power relationships
between a Black man and a police ocer, and he also brought himself closer to police
violence: “I was recording, and the police came over and smashed my phone.” While
Jordan’s experience revealed violence and destruction of property as risks incurred
when recording police, this experience also presented Jordan with another source of
legal knowledge. Specically, Jordan learned to stand further away while recording
police: “Now we learned to where when we do record, you stay a distance from them.
It was too close.”
Along with learning to interpret the sounds that guns generated, residents also
interpreted ocers’ deployment of guns as a visual signal that preceded police miscon-
duct. Kaleb, a 34-year-old resident who experienced frequent police raids while living
in public housing, has learned to attach visual signicance to police interactions that
begin with rearms. When facing a similar interaction, Kaleb analyzed ocers’ initial
deployment of their rearms as a signal of their intention to use deadly force: “I’m on
my way to work in uniform, I get o the bus …hence we go, gun out and saw the police.
I recorded what happened. They destroyed both my phones.” According to Kaleb, the
presence of rearms represented a lack of assurance that these ocers were operat-
ing fairly and deviated from the use-of-force continuum that reects widely accepted
behavioral norms (see Skogan 2023). Kaleb’s experience revealed how some ocers
reclaim authority over citizens by restricting what is knowable, even destroying citizen
property if they deem it necessary.
Seeing and hearing police: interpreting police verbal and physical behaviors
By recording police conduct on cellphones, residents also induced behavioral changes
in ocers by shifting their outward displays toward procedural justice (Sandhu 2016;
Sandhu and Haggerty 2017). For Ace, prior experiences demonstrated that ocers’ ini-
tial body language and gestures served as evidence of future breaches of power. During
a subsequent interaction, an ocer shouted at Ace and encroached on his personal
space:
When he walked up to the car, he just came o aggressively. When he came
o aggressive, that’s what made me instantly start recording, being all in the
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 235
window, and stu, talking a little loud, because like I said, it was just the railroad.
You ain’t got no reason to be all aggressive with me.
Ace described recording police behaviors as a response to how the ocer spoke and
interacted with him, indicating how he understood the ocer’s verbal expressions as
evidence of an inclination to engage in future misconduct. Furthermore, Ace tied o-
cers’ outward displays to police misconduct, which triggered his distrust and enabled
him to deploy his cellphone as a protective response:
You’re an ocer of peace, act like it. Stop just hopping into trying to be real
aggressive with me when all I did was roll over the railroad tracks. You ain’t got
no reason to be aggressive with me. You’re acting like a just ed a crime scene
…that just be rubbing me the wrong way with the police, so I don’t trust them.
Crucially, Ace’s recording of police behavior motivated ocers to adapt their conduct:
“Once I started recording, he was just a little bit more calm about himself, his tone in
his voice changed, his body language changed. He wasn’t all in the window as much.”
As a result of this experience, Ace concluded: “I still turned my camera on, but I also
learned more as far as how to deal with ocers.”
Vicarious experiences inuenced residents like Juan to use their cellphones to
resist unwarranted police intrusions. On one occasion, as he was walking home,
Juan recalled hearing police ocers say that members of the New Era Chicago
possessed guns and observed police conscating one of the community member’s
car. This situation corresponded with Juan’s perception, acquired from watching
an online video, that police ocers unfairly target members of this local commu-
nity group. Anticipating police misconduct, Juan used his cellphone to record this
exchange:
[the police say] ‘Oh, you know we got these [non-prot] people with guns, and
they’re threatening me ….’ And then the lieutenant moves and [says] ‘we gonna
have to take the car.’ So, I ended up pulling out my phone and getting on Facebook
Live and started recording [as] they did their search.
Juan continued recording until a police lieutenant arrived and concluded that there
was insucient evidence for an arrest and property seizure: “…l[the] lieutenant from
the district …like yeah man I’m sorry, I don’t know why they were gonna take the car
when there’s not gun in the car.” In this instance, Juan acted on localized knowledge
of police ocers and their relationship to a local community group. Analyzing police
and citizens, Juan linked a present police encounter to a past vicarious experience that
shaped his distrust and recording of police.
As residents perceived police words and actions, some confronted another form of
police misconduct: verbal threats and coercion. Silas, for example, observed and heard
three white ocers scolding and searching a group of young Black men. This situation
was similar to the treatment Silas had frequently encountered from the police. After
recognizing that police ocers of white racial backgrounds were enforcing public
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
236 Brandon Alston
bodily exposure with elevated voices and issuing verbal commands, Silas recorded the
encounter:
Three white cops, unmarked car, just pulling these young brothas [young Black
men in their] early [to] middle twenties [over]. [Police] have them all stretched
up on the car, got their pants down, shouting …telling them what they gonna
do, and what they not gonna do …. I stood there, and I was recording. Until one
of the three cops walked over to me and [said] ‘get on, move on, you ain’t got no
business here, you [are] interfering.’ How am I interfering standing here waiting
on the bus? But I was tryna lm. And he told me, you better not be lming this.
When one of the police ocers raised his voice, Silas understood this shift as reveal-
ing the ocers’ underlying intentions. For Silas, the loudness of the ocers’ voices
conveyed a lack of self-control and an inclination to engage in misconduct. Thus, Silas
used ocers’ perceivable actions to determine when to invoke his distrust of police
and deploy his cellphone to record them.
The analysis has shown how residents attribute signicance to ocers’ words
and actions as situational factors that contribute to making police stops recording-
worthy events. These words and actions corresponded with residents’ pertinent legal
knowledge and informed their situated distrust of police. The acquisition, storage
and retrieval of legal knowledge involved a series of ongoing processes. When resi-
dents recorded police, these experiences also served as another police contact that
informed residents’ interpretation of succeeding police interactions. In each situa-
tion, residents displayed a legal consciousness inected by awareness of racialized
law enforcement patterns to interpret and anticipate asymmetrical power relation-
ships between police ocers and Black citizens. The data have also demonstrated that
camera cues hold collective dimensions that inuence how bystanders analyze police
ocers and citizens.
Discussion and conclusion
This study connects research on the roles played by the senses and situated inter-
pretations to demonstrate how Black men use cellphones as tactical tools to contest
intrusive police contacts. Conceptually, camera cues attest to how frequent police
contact operates as racial and legal socialization, inuencing ways of sensing and
interpreting ocers, citizens and police–citizen interactions. The intense police
surveillance that residents reported has generated many personal and vicarious expe-
riences with police. During personal interactions, residents learned to recognize subtle
shifts in ocers’ comportment while negotiating the threat of injustice and injury.
Even without direct exposure to the physical danger of injury, residents also
accumulated legal knowledge from television, social media and personal networks
regarding how police treat other citizens who share similarities based on race, gender,
class and place.
With each personal or vicarious police encounter, residents adjust their perceptions
of police, indicating how the senses operate as a source of cultural meaning about jus-
tice, fairness and power relationships. The variation in camera cues is a product of past
experiences and situational contingencies. Some residents rely on words, others use
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 237
ocers’ physical actions, while others interpret ocers’ words and actions as camera
cues. Thus, residents build legal knowledge through experiences with law enforce-
ment, which inuences how residents analyze future police encounters and anticipate
police misconduct. The data indicate that residents transform symbols into signals for
action in tandem with the availability of their cellphones, fear of injury or death, social
ties to targeted citizens and commitment to procedural justice as racial justice.
Cellphones allow residents to creatively refashion networked communication ows
enabled by the internet’s capability to publicly share visual evidence to prove that
police make their everyday encounters violent. This study demonstrates that counter-
surveillance is a practice of resistance that produces new power relationships along-
side preexisting power relationships. While organized activists sign up for “witnessing
shifts” (Huey et al. 2006), ordinary residents learn to witness shifts in police ocers’
behaviors and record them strategically. Such acts of resistance executed by ordinary
residents using cellphones to instigate condemnation of police can impose benets
and penalties. Many residents use cellphones to actively resist police ocers’ attempts
to control themselves and other citizens. Yet, such citizen countersurveillance is
penalized by ocers, who often use coercion, verbal threats, property destruction and
physical assaults to reassert authority. By recording police, residents add another layer
of oversight of authorized patterns of police surveillance and complement their roles
as the policed with an additional role as policers of police.
This study extends sociolegal research in several ways. For legal cynicism research,
the analysis shows how residents’ situated interpretations of police ocers trigger
their distrust in specic ocers and enable them to prepare for misconduct, thereby
eliciting the use of their cellphones. With each police encounter, residents can acquire
and analyze specic behavioral patterns and situational dynamics that forecast when
legal actors are likely to engage in misconduct and, therefore, illegitimate and worthy
of distrust. Individual encounters with police ocers create distrust of how o-
cers suspend individuals’ sense of legitimacy or trust in legal actors. This situated
form of distrust connects to individuals’ broader legal estrangement that develops
through their knowledge of police mistreatment. The ndings suggest that legal cyni-
cism research can benet from examining the situational circumstances under which
residents develop distrust toward legal actors and interrogate the legitimacy of the
law. Researchers should also seek to understand how residents’ distrust of legal actors
might serve protective purposes and facilitate social bonds between residents.
For legal consciousness scholarship, the analysis of camera cues demonstrates how
racialized personal and vicarious experiences with law enforcement shape the subjec-
tive interpretations and resistant actions of ordinary residents who rely on cellphones.
While research on residents’ vicarious exposure to legal actors is still nascent, this
study reveals that understanding vicarious exposure to legal actors is vital to assessing
how the law shapes an individual’s legal consciousness. In particular, vicarious expo-
sure to police allows individuals to rene their second-order legal consciousness and
allows bystanders to produce similar results to targeted victims who recorded police.
The ndings also suggest that in settings saturated with racialized police misconduct,
individuals can mutually constitute racial and legal consciousness to attend to the
racially discriminatory operation of law enforcement. Legal consciousness scholarship
can gain additional insights from analyses of how individuals develop commonsense
understandings about the racialized enforcement of the law.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
238 Brandon Alston
The prevalence of individuals recording police misconduct suggests that “camera
cues” might exist outside Chicago. For example, in one of the most notable cases of
police misconduct and violence, former Ocer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd
in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the 2021 Chauvin trial, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-
old Black woman who recorded the now-viral video that depicts Chauvin suocating
Floyd to death, states: “It was like a natural instinct, honestly. The world needed to
see what I was seeing.” While Frazier declares that she recorded the incident based
on instinct, she later noted that she started to record “as soon as I heard him [Floyd]
trying to ght for his life.” Like those of Ramsey Orta, who recorded the fatal moment
where ocer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death, Frazier’s statements cor-
respond with this study’s ndings that residents use cellphones based on situated
sensory perceptions of symbols associated with police misconduct.
This study also has some limitations that open up new avenues for future research.
First, the sample provides insights into how low-income Black men, a racialized, gen-
dered and classed group, use cellphones based on past experiences with police ocers.
Residents with similar social locations might deploy their cellphones based on past
interactions with legal authorities, understanding of their and others’ social statuses
and situational interpretations of legal actors. Future research might explore how vari-
ations in the experiences of other groups lead to distinctive forms of camera cues.
Second, this study examines what camera cues convey about police misconduct, but
future research might explore when ocers’ behaviors convey appropriate police con-
duct. Third, broader questions remain about how individuals perceive and use other
recording technologies and cop-watching applications. As researchers continue to
analyze police–citizen relationships, they should also explore in greater depth how
ordinary residents develop perceptions of police and citizens, which inform the use of
recording technologies.
Acknowledgements. The author received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to com-
plete this research. The author reports no conicts or competing interests related to this research. The
author reports some of the codes used for this research in the ndings.
Note
1. The interviews in this study are part of a larger study of Black men’s experiences with the criminal
legal system, the majority of whom had not recorded police behaviors at the time of the interview.
References
Anderson, E. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Baer, A.S. 2020. Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police
Accountability in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Balto, S. 2019. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill: UNC
Press Books.
Barbalet, J. 2009. “A Characterization of Trust, and Its Consequences.” Theory and Society 38 (4): 367–82.
Baumgartner, F. R., D. A. Epp and K. Shoub. 2018. Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Trac Stops Tell Us about
Policing and Race. Cambridge University Press.
Bell, M. C. 2016. “Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism.” Law & Society
Rev. 50 (2): 314–47.
Bell, M. C. 2017. “Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement.” The Yale Law J. 126: 2054–150.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 239
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Penguin.
Black, D. 1983. “Crime as Social Control.” American Sociological Rev. 48 (1): 34–45.
Black, C. 2017. The DOJ Investigation of the Chicago Police Department: The Complete Report by the United States
Department of Justice. Simon and Schuster.
Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Clis: Prentice-Hall.
Bock, M. A. 2016. “Record the Police! Cop-Watching and Its Embodied Narratives.” J. of Communication 66
(1): 13–34.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bradshaw, E. A. 2013. “This Is What a Police State Looks Like: Sousveillance, Direct Action and the Anti-
Corporate Globalization Movement.” Critical Criminology 21 (4): 447–61.
Brayne, Sarah. 2014. “Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional
Attachment.” American Sociological Rev. 79: 367–91.
Brayne, S., K. Levy and B.C. Newell. 2018. “Visual Data and the Law.” Law & Social Inquiry 43 (4): 1149–63.
Browne, S. 2015. Dark Matters. Durham: Duke University Press.
Browne, S. 2019. “‘That Place They’re Rebuilding’: Investment and Hope in Chicago’s Englewood
Neighborhood.”
Brunson, R. K. 2007. “‘Police Don’t like Black People’: African-American Young Men’s Accumulated Police
Experiences.” Criminology & Public Policy 6 (1): 71–101.
Brunson, Rod K. and Jacinta Gau. 2015. “Ocer Race Versus Macro-Level Context: A Test of Competing
Hypotheses About Black Citizens’ Experiences with and Perceptions of Black Police Ocers.” Crime &
Delinquency 61: 213–42.
Campbell, J., L. Rose, J. Kub and D. Nedd. 1998. “Voices of Strength and Resistance: A Contextual and
Longitudinal Analysis of Women’s Responses to Battering.” J. of Interpersonal Violence 13 (6): 743–62.
Cerulo, K.A., V. Leschziner and H. Shepherd. 2021. “Rethinking Culture and Cognition.” Annual Rev. of
Sociology 47: 63–85.
Chan, C.S.C. and Z. Yao. 2018. “A Market of Distrust: Toward A Cultural Sociology of Unocial Exchanges
between Patients and Doctors in China.” Theory and Society 47 (6): 737–72.
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. 2021. “Community Data Snapshots,” https://www.cmap.
illinois.gov/data/community-snapshots (accessed August 15, 2021).
Chua, L.J. and D.M. Engel. 2019. “Legal Consciousness Reconsidered.” Annual Rev. of Law and Social Science
15: 335–53.
Clair, M. 2021. “Being a Disadvantaged Criminal Defendant: Mistrust and Resistance in Attorney-Client
Interactions.” Social Forces 100 (1): 194–217.
Clay-Warner, J. 2001. “Perceiving Procedural Injustice: The Eects of Group Membership and Status.”
Social Psychology Quarterly 64 (3): 224–38.
Collins, R. 2009. Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kirk, David and Andrew V. Papachristos. 2011. “Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood
Violence.” American J. of Sociology 116: 1190–233.
Desmond, M., A.V. Papachristos and D.S. Kirk. 2016. “Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the
Black Community.” American Sociological Rev. 81 (5): 857–76.
DiMaggio, P. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Rev.of Sociology 23 (1): 263–87.
Du Bois, W.E.B. ([1903] 1990) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books.
Duck, W. 2017. “The Complex Dynamics of Trust and Legitimacy: Understanding Interactions between the
Police and Poor Black Neighborhood Residents.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 673 (1): 132–49.
Eliasoph, N. and P. Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American J. of Sociology 108 (4): 735–94.
Ewick, P. and S.S. Silbey. 1998. The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ewick, P. and S. Silbey. 2003. “Narrating Social Structure: Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority.”American
J. of Sociology 108 (6): 1328–72.
Fagan, J., A. A. Braga, R. K. Brunson and A. Pattavina. 2016. “Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance,
and Race in the New Policing.” Fordham Urban Law J. 43: 539.
Fagan, Jerey and Garth Davies. 2000. “Street Stops and Broken Windows: Terry, Race, and Disorder in
New York City.” Fordham University Law J. 28: 457.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
240 Brandon Alston
Fine, G.A. and C.D. Fields. 2008. “Culture and Microsociology: The Anthill and the Veldt.” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 619 (1): 130–48.
Freivogel, W. H. 2011. “Illinois’ Tough Eavesdropping Law Ruled Unconstitutional.” Gateway Journalism Rev.
41 (324): 7–9.
Gau, J.M. 2011. “The Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy:
An Empirical Test of Core Theoretical Propositions.” J. of Criminal Justice 39 (6): 489–98.
Gau, J.M. and R.K. Brunson. 2010. “Procedural Justice and Order Maintenance Policing: A Study of Inner-
City Young Men’s Perceptions of Police Legitimacy.” Justice Quarterly 27 (2): 255–79.
Gau, J. M. and R. K. Brunson. 2015. “Procedural Injustice, Lost Legitimacy, and Self-Help: Young Males’
Adaptations to Perceived Unfairness in Urban Policing Tactics.” J. of Contemporary Criminal Justice 31 (2):
132–50.
Gibson, M. J. 2015. “Just because It’s Legal Doesn’t Mean You Can Do It: The Legality of Employee
Eavesdropping and Illinois Workplace Recording Policies.” Loyola University of Chicago Law J. 46: 913.
Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery ofGrounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative
Research. Chicago: Aldine.
Goman, A. 2009. “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto.” American Sociological Rev. 74 (3):
339–57.
Goldsmith, A.J. 2010. “Policing’s New visibility.” The British J. of Criminology 50 (5): 914–34.
Hagan, John and Celesta Albonetti (1982) “Race, Class, and the Perception of Criminal Injustice in
America,” American J. of Sociology 88: 329–55.
Hagan, J., B. McCarthy and D. Herda. 2022. Chicago’s Reckoning: Racism, Politics, and the Deep History of Policing
in an American City. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hegtvedt, K.A. 2005. “Doing Justice to the Group: Examining the Roles of the Group in Justice Research.”
Annual Rev. of Sociology 31: 25–45.
Hinton, E. 2021. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s. London:
Liveright Publishing.
Huey, L., K. Walby and A. Doyle. 2006. “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of
(Counter)Surveillance as a Tool of Resistance.” In Surveillance and Security. Technological Politics and Power
in Everyday Life, edited by T. Monahan, 149–65. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Jackson, J., B. Bradford, M. Hough, A. Myhill, P. Quinton and T. Tyler, 2012. On the Justication and
Recognition of Police Power: Broadening the Concept of Police Legitimacy. Yale Law School, Public Law
Working Paper, (251).
Jones, N. 2018. The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption, Vol. 6. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Jones-Brown, D. D. 2000. “Debunking the Myth of Ocer Friendly: How African American Males
Experience Community Policing.” J. of Contemporary Criminal Justice 16 (2): 209–29.
Kramer, R. and B. Remster. 2018. “Stop, Frisk, and Assault? Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force during
Investigatory Stops.” Law & Society Rev. 52 (4): 960–93.
Kwak, H., R. Dierenfeldt and S. McNeeley. 2019. “The Code of the Street and Cooperation with the Police:
Do Codes of Violence, Procedural Injustice, and Police Ineectiveness Discourage Reporting Violent
Victimization to the Police?” J. of Criminal Justice 60: 25–34.
Lembo, A. 2020. “He Heard, She Heard: Toward a Cultural Sociology of the Senses.” Sociological Forum 35
(2): 443–64.
Mann, S. and J. Ferenbok. 2013. “New Media and the Power Politics of Sousveillance in a Surveillance-
Dominated World.” Surveillance & Society 11 (1/2): 18.
Marx, G.T. 2003. “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting.” J. of Social Issues 59 (2): 369–90.
Mazerolle, L., E. Antrobus, S. Bennett and T.R. Tyler. 2013. “Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police
Legitimacy: A Randomized Field Trial of Procedural Justice.” Criminology 51 (1): 33–63.
Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mead, G.H. and C. Schubert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society, Vol. 111. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meares, T.L., T.R. Tyler and J. Gardener. 2015. “Lawful or Fair? How Cops and Laypeople Perceive Good
Policing.” J. of Criminal Law & Criminology 105: 297.
Merry, S.E. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C.W. 2014. The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Law & Society Review 241
Monahan, Torin. 2006. “Counter-Surveillance as Political Intervention?” Social Semiotics 16 (4): 515–34.
Muhammad, K.G. 2010. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,
with a New Preface. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Muller, Christopher and Daniel Schrage. 2014. “Mass Imprisonment and Trust in the Law.” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 651: 139–58.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Proactive Policing: Eects on Crime and
Communities. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Nielsen, B. L. 2000. “Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about
Law and Street Harassment.” Law & Society Rev. 34: 201–36.
Obasogie, O.K. 2010. “Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations.” Law &
Society Rev. 44 (3-4): 585–616.
Passavant, P.A. 2021. Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Pollard, O.M. 2015. Englewood: The Impact of an Underserved Community that is Faced by Violence:
Politicians vs. Residents vs. Advocates.
Ralph, L. 2020. The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Remster, B., C.M. Smith and R. Kramer. 2022. “Race, Gender, and Police Violence in the Shadow of
Controlling Images.” Social Problems 71 (2): 353–76.
Richardson, A. V. 2020. Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest#
Journalism. USA: Oxford University Press.
Rojek, J., R. Rosenfeld and S. Decker. 2012. “Policing Race: The Racial Stratication of Searches in Police
Trac Stops.” Criminology 50 (4): 993–1024.
Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Eect. Chicago:
University of Chicago.
Sanburn, J. 2015. “Eric Garner Witness Ramsey Orta Has Regrets One Year Later.” https://time.com/
ramsey-orta-eric-garner-video/ (accessed March 14, 2017).
Sandhu, A. 2016. “Camera-Friendly Policing: How the Police Respond to Cameras and Photographers.”
Surveillance & Society 14 (1): 78–89.
Sandhu, A. and K. D. Haggerty. 2017. “Policing on Camera.” Theoretical Criminology 21 (1): 78–95.
Schwarz, O. 2015. “The Sound of Stigmatization: Sonic Habitus, Sonic Styles, and Boundary Work in an
Urban Slum.” American J. of Sociology 121 (1): 205–42.
Silbey, Susan S. 2005. “After Legal Consciousness.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1: 323–68.
Simmel, G. 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings Frisby, David, and Featherstone, Mike, Vol. 903. London:
Sage.
Singh, A. 2017. “Proleptic: Anticipatory Citizen Surveillance of the Police.” Surveillance & Society 15 (5):
676–88.
Skogan, W.G. 2017. “Stop-and-Frisk and Trust in Police in Chicago 1.” In Police–Citizen Relations across the
World, 246–65. Routledge.
Skogan, W.G. 2023. Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, A. 2015. “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/
04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/ (accessed September 28, 2017).
Søgaard, T.F., T. Kolind, M.B. Haller, T. Kammersgaard and G. Hunt. 2023. “‘Filming Is Our Only Weapon
against the Police’: Ethnic Minorities and Police Encounters in the New Visibility Era.” The British J. of
Criminology 63 (3): 553–69.
Stuart, F. 2016a. “Becoming ‘Cop Wise’: Policing, Culture, and the Collateral Consequences of Street-Level
Criminalization.” Law & Society Rev. 50 (2): 279–313.
Stuart, F. 2016b. Down, Out, and under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Rev. 51: 273–86.
Tavory, Iddo and Nina Eliasoph. 2013. “Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation.” American
J. of Sociology 118 (4): 908–42.
Taylor, F. 2019. The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Timmermans, S. and I. Tavory. 2012. “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research: From Grounded
Theory to Abductive Analysis.” Sociological Theory 30 (3): 167–86.
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
242 Brandon Alston
Tyler, T.R. 2004. “Enhancing Police Legitimacy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 593 (1): 84–99.
Tyler, T. R., J. Fagan and A. Geller. 2014. “Street Stops and Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments in Young
Urban Men’s Legal Socialization.” J. of Empirical Legal Studies 11 (4): 751–85.
Tyler, T.R. and Y.J. Huo. 2002. Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation.
The United States Department of Justice. 2017, March 17. Justice Department Announces Findings of
Investigation into Chicago Police Department. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-
announces-ndings-investigation-chicago-police-department (accessed March 24, 2021).
Vargas, R., C. Williams, P. O’Sullivan and C. Cano. 2020. Capitalizing on Crisis: Chicago Police Responses to
Homicide Waves 1920-2020.
Voigt, R., N.P. Camp, V. Prabhakaran, W.L. Hamilton, R.C. Hetey, C.M. Griths, D. Jurgens, D. Jurafsky and
J.L. Eberhardt. 2017. “Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Ocer
Respect.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (25): 6521–26.
Wall, T. and T. Linnemann. 2014. “Staring down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War
on Cameras.” Crime, Media, Culture 10 (2): 133–49.
Webb, L. 2017. “Legal Consciousness as Race Consciousness: Expansion of the Fourth Amendment Seizure
Analysis through Objective Knowledge of Police Impunity.” Seton Hall Law Rev. 48: 403.
Weitzer, Ronald and Steven A. Tuch. 2004. “Race and Perceptions of Police Misconduct.” SocialProblems 51
(3): 305–25.
Werth, Robert. 2012. “I Do What I’m Told, Sort of: Reformed Subjects, Unruly Citizens, and Parole.”
Theoretical Criminology 16 (3): 329–46.
Whitson, A. M. 2014. “The Need for Additional Safeguards against Racist Police Practices: A Call for Change
to Massachusetts & Illinois Wiretapping Laws.” BCJL & Social Justice 34: 195.
Wilson, D. J. and T. Serisier. 2010. “Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance.”
Surveillance & Society 8 (2): 166–80.
Young, A.A. 2011. The Minds of Marginalized Black Men. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Young, K.M. 2014. “Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockght.” Law &
Society Rev. 48 (3): 499–530.
Young, Kathryne M. and Katie R. Billings. 2020. “Legal consciousness and cultural capital.” Law & Society
Rev. 54 (1): 33–65.
Zerubavel, E. 1999. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Brandon Alston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University.
Cite this article: Alston, Brandon. 2024. “Recognizing “camera cues”: policing, cellphones and citizen
countersurveillance.” Law & Society Review 58(2): 216–242. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2024.16 Published online by Cambridge University Press
