Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in front of the Television Camera (review)

The book's title, credited to Liz Doyle, encapsulates Aaron Doyle's argument: televised images of policing arrest viewers. This is nothing new, of course. One of US television's earliest success stories was Dragnet, a drama based loosely on Los Angeles Police Department cases. In Canada the first CBC television newscast featured anchorman Lorne Greene reciting in his rich voice the tale of the Boyd Gang's escape from Toronto's Don Jail.

Doyle's focus is on television's more recent love affair with crime and policing. The mid-1990s to the turn of the century was a period over which technological change, television industry restructuring, viewing audience fragmentation, and political shifts towards popular punitiveness put 'actual' crime prominently before the television camera. And the video camera. And the closed-circuit camera. Yet in a book about images, Doyle hastens to downplay television's visuality. As he says, we talk of 'watching TV' but television is also a verbal medium and images are given meaning through words (typically uttered by criminal justice authorities). Furthermore, the reception of televised representations of crime takes place in the context not just of prevailing political landscapes, but of other programs. If Dragnet and the news were once simple to distinguish, the differences between dramatized fiction, documentary, and 'the news' have blurred considerably and informed each other's cognition.

Doyle pursues these ideas from a point of view that few media scholars, concerned about the effects of media content on viewers, have considered. He asks: 'how is crime and policing itself altered as it is televised?' and he addresses that question through an analysis of four case studies. The first, the syndicated television show COPS, will be the most familiar (especially to late-night viewers, as episodes are shown repeatedly in endless vignettes of police encounters with drunks, drug runners, wife beaters, and foul-mouthed prowlers). The second extends the first, through an examination of the use of home video and surveillance footage in television news and on reality television shows, such as Caught on Tape. Doyle's remaining cases are a study of television coverage of the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot (1994) and a critique of protest group Greenpeace's deliberate flouting of the law and courting of television coverage.

Although a sociological study and a contribution to media theorization, this is also a book about the politics of representation. Earlier theorists (particularly Joshua Meyerowitz) speculated that technological changes, such as the proliferation of video cameras and the declining influence of network television, had the potential to democratize representations of justice and to allow ordinary citizens to scrutinize and publicize the darker dealings of the police. Doyle disagrees. To a remarkable extent, police organizations have managed to maintain their thin blue line identity, through filtering content on COPS, feeding damning footage to news outlets and, in the case of the Vancouver riot, actually seizing news tapes that recorded possibly incriminating police tactics. The potential to televise police wrongdoing remains (he cites the damning footage of the infamous pepper-spraying incident at the APEC protest), but it has failed so far to achieve its authority-challenging potential.

One reason for this is that watching action-oriented police encounters is entertaining. It has to be in order to work according to the 'media logic' of television. Greenpeace organizers are conscious of this, Doyle argues, and their canny media orientation (dangerous 'stunts' on the high seas, for instance) has limited the kinds of issues they focus upon and inspired their theatrical simple-message style.

In a contrastingly abstract postscript Doyle contributes to discussions of crime and its representations by arguing that we have become consumers of arresting images that fuse surveillance and spectacle. If the penitentiary introduced a governing strategy in which the few monitored the many, reality television and 'actuality' footage of police practices...