CCTV and the 2010 Vancouver games: spatial tactics and political strategies.

• Author: Vonn, Michael
• Position: Closed circuit television - Somebody's Watching Me: Surveillance and Privacy in an Age of National Insecurity

This paper is a brief discussion of CCTV surveillance of public demonstrations from a legal geography perspective, looking at CCTV as a spatial tactic. This paper focuses on this issue in the context of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and comments on the political strategies being used in regards to CCTV for the Olympics and more generally. ([dagger])

1. INTRODUCTION

   There are many aspects of CCTV that are legitimately contested and illustrate various nuances in the use and impact of video surveillance.

   For example, there is research which would indicate that video surveillance in a given context may cause fear in some people, yet be a reassurance to others. (1)

   However, almost nobody seems to dispute that cameras aimed at protesters are not there for the protestors' benefit. They are not for the protesters' "safety," nor to "facilitate" their use of public space. Cameras situated primarily for the purpose of capturing expressive activity are not for the speakers, but rather are deployed against the speakers.

   There is not much support for any other view and, indeed, even police organizations concede this point when it is their own ox that is gored--such as the New York Police Union, which in 2006 sued the City of New York for photographing and videoing off-duty officers at a public demonstration protesting the pace of their contract talks. (2) The police union claimed that the heavy-handed surveillance tactics which, of course, are routinely used at war protests and anti-poverty marches, were a violation of the police officers' fights to free speech. (3) Clearly, the visual surveillance increasingly being used to monitor public expressive activity has a chilling effect that is almost assuredly one of its aims.

   Visual capture makes us much more identifiable in public space to authorities and erodes our public anonymity. Our public anonymity is not a matter of being unrecognizable, but, as Alan Westin puts it, of being able to blend in to the "situational landscape." (4)

   The loss of public anonymity affects freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and public politics in general. So CCTV surveillance in the context of public demonstrations affects who says what, and how and where they say it.

   This paper is a brief discussion of CCTV surveillance of public demonstrations from a legal geography perspective. It specifically looks at CCTV as a spatial tactic. This paper focuses on this issue in the context of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and comments on the political strategies being used in regards to CCTV for the Olympics and more generally.

2. CCTV AS A SPATIAL TACTIC

   Legal geography deals with the intersection between space and law: It highlights the fundamental importance of spatial concepts in the law, for example, the critical importance of spatial concepts like property, borders and jurisdictions, and the distinction between public and private as a foundational organizing principle of most fights theories. (6) Legal geography unpacks the assumptions about space that are embedded in the law and tries to understand these connections. (7)

   A "spatial tactic" is the "use of space as a strategy and/or technique of power and social control." (8) So-called "mega-events" such as the Olympics provide an embarrassment of fiches for students of spatial tactics, particularly those tactics dealing with the policing of public space and the control of expressive activity.

   The best primer on spatial tactics and their relationship to public speech in the U.S. context is Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places by legal scholar Timothy Zick. (9) Zick describes how the space needed for democratic discourse, which he terms "the expressive topography," has been dramatically reduced by the steady erosion of public space through privatization and development, a vast array of spatial tactics of containment and displacement, and First Amendment legal doctrine that views space as abstract and fungible. (10)

   Most people's understanding of the importance of place, in terms of their rights, is pretty crude. We typically use the language of and imagine ourselves as "rights-bearing individuals." It is implicit in this idea that our rights go where we go--at least in so far as we are in our own country--which is why people are often stunned to discover how ludicrously byzantine and non-intuitive the geography of rights actually is.

   For example, in British Columbia we have a type of so-called "safe streets" law that seeks to regulate panhandling. (11) This is a boilerplate type of law that is seen in many jurisdictions. (12) It prohibits "solicitation" in certain zones and makes it illegal, for example, for the Chief of Police to solicit donations for the Raise-a-Reader literacy campaign within a certain distance of a bus stop or for Brownies to sell their cookies too close to an ATM machine. And it is not just the Brownies who are unlikely to know this; the Chief of Police might also be unaware. The point is that there is little understanding of how imperative place is to rights. Place is where power and rights are contested. That is what public expression is about.

   However, the more highly "securitized" the place, the less likely it is to be a site of spatial contention. Securitization, and particularly visual surveillance, has become a commonplace spatial tactic. While the U.K. is infamous as the cake-taker regarding public surveillance by CCTV, many cities in North America are following in step. (13)

   Securitization through visual surveillance is often cited as a technique for displacement, i.e., to discourage the supposedly "criminogenic others" who are the targets of "broken windows"-inflected policing. (14) Yet much less has been said about the increasing CCTV presence at the traditional sites of assembly for public expression and contention. Additionally, surprisingly little has been said about the use of CCTV in the nontraditional sites that are specifically designed for protest and surveillance, such as the already notorious "free speech zones" currently being built for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. (15)

3. CCTV AT THE 2010 GAMES

   As Philip Boyle and Kevin Haggerty have pointed out, surveillance architecture is not a mere by-product of hosting the Olympics; it is an actual "deliverable." (16) It is an...