The Panopticon Effect : the surveillance of police officers

Past research has reported the dilemmas, conundrums and vexations that police officer are routinely exposed to in their working lives. Carabetta (2003) spoke of the serious and inequitable implications surrounding police officers employment status compared to other employees, with common law having long established that police officers are not actually employees. Others have raised the challenges surrounding police practice in terms of the level of accountability and transparency within such practice as well as the types and level of complaints being made against police (Dixon & Smith, 1998; Smith, 2001; Smith 2010). This includes associated and/or ensuing litigation, and problems of civil liability that may subsequently face police (Smith, 2003; Harlow, 2004; Hughes, 2001; McCulloch & Palmer, 2005; Hopkins, 2011). There has been a plethora of writings on police accountability, scrutiny and surveillance (Walker, 2006; Rushin, 2011; Trottier, 2012; Walker & Archbold, 2013), however, the main omission from this body of literature is the examination of police accountability, scrutiny and surveillance and the effect of such through the lived experiences of rank and file police officers. This paper offers an examination of the surveillance of rank and file police officers, using the concepts of the ‘Panopticon’ (Foucault, 1979) and the ‘Looking Glass Self’ (Cooley, 1902) as theoretical frameworks, in order to make sense of their lived experiences.