2
Citizen Equipment
The Rise of 911 Emergency
At 2:00 a.m. in a southwest Denver neighborhood, forty-four-year-old Loretta Barella Rosa ran across the street to her neighbor’s house, banging on the door and screaming for help. Loretta’s husband, Christopher Alex Parea, was following at her heels, demanding that she return to their house. When Loretta’s neighbor came to the door and saw the terror in Loretta’s face, instead of opening the door she grabbed a telephone and called the police. While the neighbor watched Parea drag Loretta off the porch and pull her across the street, the 911 operator assured her that help was on the way. Yet as the neighbor waited, the police failed to arrive. Forty minutes later, the neighbor called 911 again. The dispatcher assured her, “We’re trying to get somebody there.”1 When a police officer finally arrived on the scene at 3:10 a.m.—seventy minutes after the initial 911 call—the neighbor stayed inside her house because she wanted to remain anonymous. The officer shined a flashlight into a window of the home that Loretta and Parea shared before retreating to his car and leaving the scene. Five hours later, at 8:15 a.m., Parea himself called 911, informing the police that he might have killed his wife. This time the officers promptly embarked to the house, where they found Loretta’s dead body lying in a pool of blood. At about 9:00 a.m., Parea was finally taken into police custody, where he was held on suspicion of Loretta’s murder.2
The sad story of Loretta’s death points to a number of social challenges in contemporary American life. Most clearly it touches on the lack of accountability that many urban police departments have to their constituents, particularly in neighborhoods filled with immigrants and the poor. Yet Loretta’s death also presents a unique perspective on the relationship between media and police power, particularly how communication technologies introduce a tightly constrained field of action into citizens’ social responsibility. Once the neighbor called the cops, she trusted them to fully assume the burden of protecting Loretta. So when Loretta’s neighbor informed the operator, “I’ve never seen anything like it. . . . She needs somebody out here,”3 she followed through on her end of the social compact: when it comes to policing, seeing and saying—surveillance and communication—are supposed to be citizens’ sole responsibilities. Although the dying woman really “needed somebody,” Loretta’s neighbor obediently stayed inside and waited for the cops.
Because the telephone and other media technologies have allowed the police apparatus to “govern at a distance”4—that is, they have provided the technical capacity for citizens to take personal responsibility for local governance and, when necessary, to summon authorities from afar—the police apparatus has been inserted into the very center of communal structures of responsibility, often alienating citizens from their neighbors and discouraging direct social action. Ultimately, this technological mediation has played an important role in transforming social responsibility into civic responsibility. For Peter Moskos, a criminologist and former Baltimore police officer, the telephone and kindred technologies gave rise to this rift in local solidarity: “Citizens, rather than being encouraged to maintain community standards, were urged to stay behind locked doors and call 911.”5 While in the best of circumstances this deference to the police might not be a cause for serious concern, today, when police agencies are financially drained and increasingly unaccountable to their constituents, neighbors are often left to rely on one another for direct local action. In this regard, although the Denver Police Department has refused to comment on their deplorable failure to save Loretta’s life, her neighbor gave a plausible reason for the police’s response delay: she called 911 right when the bars were closing on a Saturday night, so the cops were probably busy handing out disorderly conduct violations and underage drinking tickets.6 At a time when public agencies are under the gun to justify and sustain themselves financially, it is tragic, although not especially surprising, that police departments will carry out revenue-generating activities at the expense of responding to potentially deadly domestic disturbances. So while it is difficult to fault Loretta’s neighbor for staying inside while her friend was being beaten to death across the street, we should begin to think in creative ways about local solidarity in these neoliberal times.
This chapter reviews how police telecommunications systems—such as the telegraphic private box, the telephone callbox, 911 Emergency, and crime-reporting smartphone apps—have helped the police monitor and guide how citizens recognize and report crime in their communities. Throughout their history, these technologies have performed a number of mediating functions that have allowed police agencies to recruit ideal informants, surveil and track witnesses, prevent the reporting of low-priority crimes (such as sexual assault and other offenses against women), and discourage certain populations from contacting the police. Thus while a number of scholars have focused on how media representations instruct their audiences how to live in accordance with liberal ideals,7 in this chapter I will focus on how technologies like the telegraph private box and 911 Emergency have provided the technical infrastructure that makes possible the very formation of liberal governance. Advances in telecommunication technologies have allowed sparse police patrols to extend their surveillance reach by opening up communications between select citizens, police headquarters, and officers on the ground.8 By empowering these citizens to contact the police, the advent of citizen-police telecommunications demonstrates what Jeremy Packer has identified as the fundamental role of communication technologies in liberal government: to “activate subjects without being overly intrusive or coercive. . . . [Liberalism] is a form of governance built upon allowing and encouraging—one might even say fostering—very particular forms of freedom that lead to, and are derived by, the maxim that government rules best when ruling least.”9 While the telegraph and telephone did not teach citizens how to care for themselves and their communities in accordance with liberal ideals, they did make possible new forms of civic participation and new relational norms between citizens and the police.10 Thus media technologies—from the earliest police telegraph to today’s chicest smartphone—have introduced spatial and temporal versatility into liberal systems of social control, providing loci of regulation by which citizens’ behavior can be channeled into productive, monitored forms of seeing/saying citizenship. As Andrew Barry has emphasized in his work on the telegraph, telecommunication technologies “have come to provide the perfect material base for liberal government.”11 Indeed: the long history of 911 Emergency illustrates how technologically mediated lateral surveillance and communication have provided crucial tools for the formation and maintenance of American liberalism.
Telecommunications and the “Reactive” Police Force
Every citizen . . . must feel an interest in the institution and development of the system that protects his person and property.
—Howard Sprogle12
As I detailed in the previous chapter, a number of media technologies have been used to locally responsibilize citizens and secure their loyalty to the police apparatus. Crowdsourcing, however, is not the only way that media have been deployed to secure citizen participation. Describing how early citizen crowdsourcing efforts like the hue and cry were transformed into a sanitized “reporting” process, Ann DeWindt and Edwin DeWindt observe: “A once vigorous, boisterous, sometimes reckless and potentially dangerous, fundamentally oral and face-to-face institution, with collective responsibility assumed for its success, had . . . been tamed, bureaucratized, depersonalized, and reduced to a routine of composing and filing a memorandum.”13 This development of a media-driven crime reporting process reached a crucial stage with the rise of telecommunication technologies in the nineteenth century, as “reporting” became a mechanism of patrol activation as well as record-keeping. By constructing a system of citizen-police telecommunications, police agencies provided citizens with the necessary technical equipment to see something and say something: to report their fellow citizens’ misdeeds and summon police from a distance.
The modern police apparatus, in fact, has been molded by the way in which these technologies empower citizens to witness and report crime. In his classic analysis of American policing in the 1970s, Albert J. Reiss declared that the modern police force is fundamentally a “reactive organization.”14 Given its institutional and technological structure, the modern police force has been designed to react to citizen-generated tips and complaints.15 Recent research, in fact, has shown that citizens’ phone calls determine the majority of police activities, even outweighing the demands of tactical strategy and mandates from police administration.16 In fact, in major urban jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., police routinely spend seventy percent of their time fielding constituents’ 911 calls.17 And in some parts of the country, 911 calls consume as much as ninety percent of officers’ time.18 While the spread of 911 in the 1970s and 1980s energized this transformation of the police force, citizen tips have long provided the very organizational conditions of the modern police patrol. In fact, one hundred years before the rise of 911, police agencies were already experimenting with how media technologies could cultivate and control active modes of citizen participation.19
While the telegraph had an enormous impact on diverse sectors of public and professional life, it had a particularly decisive effect on the labor of policing. In fact, one of the earliest experiments in electric telegraphy was in 1845, when police from the south of England used a telegraph to nab a murderer en route to London. John Tawell, who had murdered his mistress before boarding a train to London’s Paddington Station, was outrun by this new technology: after disembarking he was followed, apprehended, and eventually hanged for his crime.20 Tawell’s case, like many others that would follow, demonstrated the extraordinary impact that telecommunications technologies could have on police work. For early police historian Howard Sprogle, telegraph systems gave the police a radical boost in reach and efficiency: “By making a comparatively small force extremely efficient, and therefore a large force unnecessary, it saves a large annual expenditure for the maintenance of the department. Its introduction is in the line of real economy.”21 The advantages of the police telegraph, therefore, were often described in the terms of political economy: the police could extend their gaze deep into the lives of the public without having to employ a massive force. As a journalist with the New Jersey Ledger observed in 1856, the police telegraph
operates as a great labor saving machine . . . [It] makes the Central Police Station an intelligence office of the most extended character. . . . Extending its ramifications to every part of the city, it, in conjunction with the police force, renders the head of that department almost ubiquitous. . . . The entire police force on duty may all be aroused to vigilance in a moment, and the whole city be put instantly under surveillance for the detection of crime. It in effect greatly multiplies the police force, without the cost of maintaining a larger number of officers in the service, for it makes every man’s labor available just at the period and place where it is needed.22
Reminiscent of the “eyes and ears” rhetoric explored in the previous chapter, the rhetoric of sensory extension is given new life with the rise of the telegraph. And just as with crowdsourcing media, the seeing/saying public was not given unconditional access to this new communications system. As soon as police agencies began distributing telegraph booths to public areas, they devised means to monitor, restrict, and guide citizens’ access. An extensive technological apparatus—comprised of highly regulated callboxes, rigid media interfaces, highly trained operators and dispatchers, and diverse mechanisms of data gathering and surveillance—have mediated citizens’ relationships with the police, cultivating very particular habits of seeing, saying, and related public support.
In their earliest days, police callboxes were locked and accessible only to cops. But by the 1860s and 1870s, a few select residents of large cities like Chicago, New York, and Baltimore were allowed to use these telegraph machines in the event of an emergency.23 By restricting access to only the most trusted citizens, officials sought to tightly control the flow of information from the streets to police headquarters. In 1884 George Bartlett Prescott, an electrical engineer who wrote several books on early telecommunication technologies, described the process by which the police used these new media to facilitate very particular modes of seeing and saying:
[The telephone boxes] are opened by means of keys, which are given to all the principal people of the city, as well as to the police. In order to prevent their abuse, the locks of the alarm stations are made in such a manner that the key cannot be removed, when once placed in the lock, except by a policeman. As each key is numbered, and cannot be removed except by the co-operation of the police, the person who has given the alarm, on opening the sentry box, cannot prevent himself from being known. By this means all annoyance from unnecessary alarms are avoided, because the possessor of a key opens the box only when assistance is necessary, and is not lavish of his calls for fear of having to give up his key. It will thus be seen that each citizen co-operates by this means in the general surveillance.24
While a few trusted citizens were empowered to directly contact the police, the citizen’s telegraph key would remain locked in the box until an officer responded, thus allowing the police to identify who made the call. Submitting to surveillance, therefore, was a condition of citizens’ participation, placing early 911 technologies among the first efforts at the technical police surveillance of law-abiding American citizens.
Police agencies also regulated citizens’ participation by determining what criminal acts were reportable. For instance, one of the reasons the telegraph was so useful to the police was that it tightly controlled its users’ communicative output. As James Carey has observed, because electric transmissions were so expensive in the nineteenth century, the telegraph “demanded something closer to a ‘scientific’ language, a language of strict denotation in which the connotative features of utterance were under rigid control.”25 In fact, the telegraph industry attempted to woo police officials with the telegraph’s promise of precise, rapid communication. An 1872 advertisement for Gamewell & Co.’s police telegraphs declared that their machine allowed for “perfect, complete, and reliable” communication: “it shall be absolutely perfect.”26 The telegraph’s technical constraints, therefore, allowed the police to enforce a normalized, “perfect” ideal of civic participation by regulating the communicative behavior of crime witnesses. As in other highly regulated communicative situations, uniformity and simplicity were the hallmark of this normalization.27 For instance, when citizens approached a telegraphic “private box”—a forerunner of the phone booth that was about eight feel tall and twenty-eight inches in diameter—they were forced to manage the box’s system of dials, levers, and kinetic procedures in a way that minimized the possibility of any ambiguity, distortion, imprecision, fraud, or other forms of “noise”28 in their interactions with the police. Once a citizen unlocked the box, s/he was confronted with a strange device outfitted with a pointer that could be aligned with any one of eleven choices: arson, theft, forgery, rioting, drunkenness, murder, accidents, ordinance violation, fighting, test line, and fire. The citizen would then pigeonhole the report into one of these categories, align the pointer, and pull a handle, thus relaying to police headquarters Morse-coded data about the report and the box’s location. Thus when citizens were confronted with the telegraph’s interface, they were forced to act in accordance with the promise of the new medium: as the telegraph required precise, rapid communication, the citizen in the street could be made to act in kind. By forcing witnesses to adopt this artificial linguistic economy, the police imposed a language of witnessing that was, in the words of Philadelphia’s fire chief in 1856, “beautifully simple.”29
In effect, the telegraph box’s interface established a narrow, highly regulated domain of citizen action by determining where citizens communicated with the police, how they carried out that communication, whom they could communicate with, and what acts were reportable. Even when boxes were placed in more affluent areas, only trusted citizens were empowered to use them, thereby cutting off the vast majority of citizens from this citizen-police communications apparatus. Also, by tightly controlling the domain of the sayable through the means of the eleven-point interface, police agencies determined which crimes were reportable—and thus, which acts were publicly intelligible as being criminal offenses. For instance, although drunkenness and fighting are listed—thereby singling out the working class—rape and sexual assault are not, and thus they could not be directly reported via the callbox system. And perhaps of most importance, these boxes literally rerouted social responsibility through police headquarters. Whereas citizens would traditionally respond to violence and protect one another at the communal level, the telegraph box had only one output channel: the police department. The police telegraph and kindred media devices thus played an essential part in solidifying the modern police force’s role as the community’s sole arbiter of justice and protection, “empowering” citizens by short-circuiting their communal solidarity and channeling their social action toward highly regulated communications with the police.
Calling the Cops
The telegraph’s beautiful simplicity proved attractive to police agencies across the United States. In 1858, the firm of Charles T. and J. N. Chester outfitted New York City with a public police telegraph system, and Philadelphia followed soon after.30 Telegraphic boxes remained a popular citizen-police communications tool until a new innovation came along in 1877: the telephonic callbox, which allowed police officers and trusted citizens to carry on conversations with call takers at police headquarters. That year the city of Albany, New York, installed the first police telephone callbox, and urban jurisdictions like Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, and Milwaukee soon followed. The public boxes, which were topped with lights that would flash upon activation, encouraged citizens to contact headquarters when they witnessed crimes in the area. By the 1890s, most jurisdictions had adopted telephonic communications, and hundreds of thousands of police calls were being made each year.31 In fact, in 1884 George Bartlett Prescott expressed excitement at how callboxes allowed citizens to take an active part in the security of their communities. According to Prescott, the new police telephones empowered citizens to “call for assistance in a few moments, and thus secure from a small number of policemen the same amount of practical service that they would ordinarily get only from a numerous force. We thus see . . . that each individual plays a part in the general security, and that every one contributes to the repose of all.”32
Figure 2.1. Police telegraph system used in Chicago during the 1880s. Chicago Police Department, Report of the General Superintendent, 49.
To ensure that everyone contributed to this “general security,” however, the behavior of telephone users—just like that of telegraph users—would have to be carefully monitored and governed. Just as with the telegraph boxes of earlier decades, police agencies permitted some trusted citizens to speak directly to headquarters from callboxes and even home telephones. Among the diverse strategies for monitoring these calls, when the Chicago Police Department installed telephone machines in select households it ensured that metadata about the location and time of each call were collected at headquarters. In these early days, the department would even keep house keys for those homes with direct-to-police telephones, allowing officers to enter the premises whenever a call was made.33 So while the emergence of the telephone allowed the police to responsibilize broader sectors of the population, police agencies were careful to monitor, regulate, and guide this new freedom.
To ensure that the precision of the locked telegraphic private box was remediated into the new open system of unlocked public call boxes, federal investigators began regularly convening to study how to best use the biosocial resources of the seeing/saying public. In 1902, for example, Congress ordered the Department of Commerce and Labor to gather statistics on how police and fire agencies used telephones and telegraphs. In the department’s published findings, the authors waxed ambivalently on the advantages of the telephone: “Notwithstanding the advantage of being able to carry on a conversation by telephone, there is a certain advantage in automatic signaling, as there can be no variation, and no wrong idea can be conveyed by an excited dispatcher to a confused operator at central who can not understand what is being said.”34 While telegraphic signals required many levels of mediation and translation, telephonic communication threatened to introduce other forms of feedback and noise into the citizen-police communications system. Despite these concerns, however, the 1906 congressional report suggested adding the volatile element of citizen conversation into the mix. However, certain elements of this process would have to be prioritized; as this and future congressional reports would repeatedly emphasize, operators needed to be trained to serve very specific, technical functions in mediating the process of citizen crime reporting.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, this was accomplished by translating the telegraph’s technical constraints into the conversation protocols between citizens and telephone switchboard operators. For the first fifty years of the phone’s existence, all civilian calls were routed through operators who would manually connect callers. Yet police calls were subjected to an additional layer of mediation: police dispatchers were trained to extract very specific information in order to discern a caller’s location and determine the call’s level of emergency. As a 1942 manual for switchboard operating procedure reveals, these dispatchers functioned as a screen for citizen-generated knowledge. Dispatchers not only screened calls for certain information, they also took an active role in coproducing a particular kind of discourse: “The primary responsibility of a telephone switchboard operator is to provide telephone service of a uniformly high standard, with the least possible delay, confusion, or annoyance to telephone users. The competent operator . . . performs his functions with courtesy, accuracy, and speed.”35 Mistakes, the operator is assured, “are usually due either to misunderstanding or to carelessness.”36 And speed, of course, was essential: “Speed . . . depends largely upon the operator’s skill and accuracy in making connections. Speed can be acquired only by practice and a systematic effort to eliminate all unnecessary movements.”37 These demands for accuracy and speed, of course, were not passive responsibilities: the operator’s role was to guide the conversation along very specific lines. With these protocols operators were able to cultivate a very particular form of speaking subject, helping callers domesticate their sensory experience into actionable data that could be best used in investigations and trials. With the rise of telephonic citizen-police communications, therefore, a new strategy of communication governance emerges: although flawless communication was at first a problem of ensuring that only trusted citizens could communicate with the police, it soon became a problem of ensuring that all citizens could function as flawless communicators.
Although rotary telephones had been invented in the late nineteenth century, they were slow to revolutionize the operator-assisted model of telephonic communications. In the 1950s and 1960s, rotary phones empowered citizens to bypass operators and connect their own calls—including, of course, their calls to the police. Aiding the police’s priorities of “speed” and “accuracy,” the gradual displacement of switchboard operators in the 1950s and 1960s granted police agencies a new opportunity and a new problem: how could they harness this new direct communications capacity in order to boost police response times and assist investigations? The most significant attempt to address this problem can be traced to President Lyndon Johnson’s “war against crime.” Amid the rising crime rates of the 1960s, Johnson appointed a nineteen-member team to assess the American criminal justice system. This team, which was headed by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Harvard law professor James Vorenberg, made a number of policy recommendations related to emergency services and citizen-police communications. Emphasizing the role of the seeing/saying citizen in fighting crime, the commission announced a renewed shift toward empowering citizens through communication technologies: “Because the members of a police force are so widely dispersed when they are at work the efficiency of police communications systems is crucial. Rapid response to emergency calls, which . . . has shown to be an important factor in crime solution, depends on good communications [with the public].”38 This was particularly important, they argued, because police response time was an essential factor in crime suppression. The commission found that for crimes that went unsolved, the police’s average response time was 6.3 minutes; for cases that the police eventually solved, the average was 4.1 minutes.39
To decrease response times, the commission recommended a number of communications policy changes. Perhaps their most significant suggestion was to establish a nationwide emergency number, 911.40 The president’s commission found that Los Angeles had fifty different numbers that reached different local police jurisdictions, making it difficult for victims and witnesses to know which number to call during an emergency. Empowering citizens to more easily contact the authorities, the commission decided, was preferable to adopting the alternative: a panoptic surveillance apparatus. Although the commission considered the possibilities of introducing strategically placed microphones and closed-circuit television surveillance, they concluded that these devices were too intrusive, costly, and error prone.41 Rather, the commission suggested that telecommunications could be utilized in such a way that the state could get maximum value from its citizens. As the report concluded, “The apprehension process can respond only after it gets a call, and a number of things can be done to modify existing street communications equipment to make it easier for a victim or a witness to reach the police.”42 Continuing, the report lamented that a lack of money might prevent citizens from reporting crimes: “The victim of a robber careful enough to steal the last dime cannot now use the public telephone. Public telephones can be adapted so that the operator can be reached without using money.”43 According to the president’s commission, many urban jurisdictions had extensive networks of callboxes that were essentially useless because, as they were difficult to locate and were often locked, they didn’t tap into the immense surveillance power of the general public. The report even suggested that the boxes be painted in red, white, and blue in order to draw the public’s attention and to associate witnessing with patriotic duty.44
During the life of the telephone, therefore, the U.S. has witnessed a remarkable shift in the way that the population is allowed to participate in the policing process. In the early days of locked callboxes, very few citizens were trusted to participate. However, the spread of residential telephones opened the possibility for a new emphasis on citizens’ seeing/saying responsibility to the state. As the report of President Johnson’s commission made clear, now that the majority of citizens were proficient telephone users, law enforcement could use this proficiency to their advantage. The private innovation of the domestic rotary phone, therefore, was repurposed for the public domain: phone booths—once the only way to call the cops—exploded in popularity and, as the call for them to be painted in red, white, and blue suggests, they even became a sign of public service and social responsibility. When the possibility was raised about the public misusing this new responsibility to generate false alarms, the commission concluded that criminals would be dissuaded because they had to use their voices and could thus be identified. For this reason, the false alarm rate for telephone systems, they claimed, was less than three percent.45
Open Participation and Next-Generation 911
This unprecedented distribution of communicative access, however, gave rise to a number of problems. As I noted earlier in this chapter, Albert J. Reiss has illustrated how these technocultural developments led to the restructuring of the police department as a “reactive force.” This shift toward “demand-led policing,” which was made possible by the emergence of the private telephone and strategically placed urban telephone booths, helped produce a skewed public image of the police’s role in society. As Peter K. Manning has pointed out, “the police were perhaps overly successful in ‘selling’ the idea of demand-led policing.”46 Manning argues that by promoting the police as an organization that provides citizens with “services,” police agencies convinced the public that “response-to-calls-based policing was both a service and an effective means of controlling crime and criminals. The American version of this persuasion is perhaps seen most clearly and visibly in the way people are encouraged to call 911 via advertising on billboards, television, radio, and other mass media, and on police cars themselves. . . . What is central is the power of the idea—that police serve best by rapid responses to calls for service—in the mind of the public, the politicians, and the police.”47 Thus the figure of the seeing/saying citizen, in partnership with call-and-respond-oriented police agencies, gave rise to a reactive form of policing that took cops off their beats and placed them in patrol cars.48
This development coincided with a period of intense technologization in the policing profession, a key feature of what has come to be known as “law-and-order policing.”49 Many of the problems faced by urban police departments were seen to be answerable through technology-driven modernization, and the National Science Foundation and other agencies began pouring substantial funds into projects that studied policing technologies.50 Yet as this new policing paradigm gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government realized that many of its key “law-and-order” initiatives were not bearing fruit. Despite the near ubiquity of public and private telephones, and despite national efforts to establish crime reporting as an act of responsible citizenship, police agencies were still struggling to contain rising crime rates. According to authorities, citizens were simply not using 911 like they should. In 1984, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) was urged to publish a report on the state of 911 Emergency, it found that citizens’ hesitance to dial 911 was one of the biggest obstacles in the war on crime. The report recommended a number of interesting solutions to this problem, emphasizing that local police departments would have to do more to understand the challenges of 911 citizenship in the urban crime environment: “To understand . . . citizen-police communications, one must look at what citizens attempting to call the police go through.”51 The report found that citizens fail to report crimes for a number of valid reasons, the most important of which were inconvenience, fear of reprisal, embarrassment, and fear of culpability.52 Predictably, the DOJ report argued that these problems could be solved by adopting technical systems that provided citizens with even greater convenience and anonymity.
The DOJ also proposed that operators, dispatchers, and police departments adopt strict new call screening practices. For example, while in the 1970s most police departments restricted 911 calls to only the most life-threatening and emergent situations—ordering that citizens direct other calls through the department’s non-emergency number—the 1984 DOJ report recommended routing all police calls through 911, “leaving it to a trained, experienced professional to distinguish between urgent and non-urgent calls.”53 In other words, this important innovation signals a shift from trusted citizen authority to call-screening by “trained, experienced professionals.” The experiment in democratic urban citizen-police communications—by which every call for service was answered with a police dispatch—had proven too costly and inefficient. New screening mechanisms were in order: to make citizen reporting more efficient, and not to waste cops’ time, the report argued for a form of “differential response” that divided call urgency into “immediate mobile response,” “expedited mobile response,” or “routine mobile response.”54 To best allocate officers’ time, these screening strategies could also include “a variety of police response mechanisms, both mobile and non-mobile, by either sworn officers or civilian employees, in person or by telephone or mail, using walk-in reporting or report-taking by appointment—a wide range of nontraditional responses depending on the urgency and nature of the call.”55 Citizens, therefore, would be urged to report any and all suspicions and problems through a central number, and police agencies would filter through these reports in order to devise which response, if any, would be most appropriate.
This heavily screened democratization gained steam in the 1990s, and it has received a considerable boost in the digital age as “Next-Generation 911” uses new technologies to give citizens as many opportunities as possible to see something and say something. As Gordon Gow and Mark Ihnat have shown, these “E-911” services arise out of the same impulse that fueled the adoption of a national emergency number. While the gradual implementation of 911 as a universal police number allowed citizens to more effortlessly join the war on crime, E-911 has been used to address emergency services to the digital/mobile world.56 Services like text-to-911, GPS-enabled reporting, online tip submission, and crime-reporting smartphone apps have come to dominate the 911 media landscape. In 2007, for example, the Boston PD became the first major American police department to encourage citizens to submit crime tips via text.57 Capitalizing on these trends, the Federal Communications Commission reports that its text-to-911 program, which allows for a similar routing of text messages to appropriate police agencies, has been available to select jurisdictions since 2015.58
Perhaps the most interesting development in Next-Generation 911 technologies is the crime-reporting smartphone app. A new iPhone app, iWitness, is a good case in point. Greg Heuss, the app’s designer, promotes his product by lauding the mechanical ease with which consumers can capture and transmit data: “Any time the user feels endangered, the user simply touches the screen of their phone. At that point, the phone begins capturing video and audio of the scene . . . a steady light is emitted from the phone, and the user’s GPS coordinates are recorded. If a ‘threat’ feels imminent, the user touches the screen again, [and] 911 is called.”59 One touch of the screen activates the phone’s video and audio recording software, and another touch dials 911. Importantly, these multimodal data streamline the messy witnessing process: “[Heuss] added that law enforcement like the fact that the app records [a] video and audio file of the perpetrator—something he said was ‘much better than a vague description that most victims give to the police now.’”60 In a similar smartphone application, CrimePush, users are given a touchscreen with small icons depicting nine basic categories of crime. With an interface eerily reminiscent of the private box featured in Figure 2.1, users push the icon that represents the appropriate crime, and a bundle of data—including photo, video, audio, and location of the call—is sent to local law enforcement agencies. A Forbes report observed that CrimePush allows users to report crime effortlessly so that they “may continue with their busy lives knowing that with a push of a button, police will know and have everything to pursue the criminal. Ordinary users become the eyes and ears of authorities.”61
Figure 2.2. CrimePush app. Note the interface similarities to the telegraph box in Figure 2.1. Photo retrieved from Brendan Hugo, “CrimePush Provides a More Modern Way to Report Crimes,” ABI, February 1, 2012. http://anythingbutiphone.com.
This familiar goal of converting the public into the “eyes and ears” of authorities is being fueled by the emergence of iWitness, CrimePush, and other digital applications that allow citizens to transmit video and audio data to law enforcement authorities. In fact, these efforts are becoming increasingly localized, as police agencies reach out to different sectors of the population in order to tie digital witnessing to an ethos of community responsibility. In Somerset, Kentucky, for example, the local police department has initiated the aptly named “See-Hear-Report” program, an initiative that calls on primary and secondary school students to use anonymous text messages to report their peers for criminal or delinquent behavior.62 Somerset police chief Doug Nelson says these initiatives are the natural next-step of law enforcement in a digital culture: “Students today are growing up in a digital age. . . . Therefore, it’s important for the law enforcement community and our police department to offer different ways to interact with our youth.”63 Yet in lieu of “interacting” with the local youth, the Somerset Police Department has simply provided them with the technical resources to effortlessly police their peers. According to Chief Nelson, “Text messaging is a common communication method for them these days and we want to make it easy for them to pass information to us that could save lives”64 This small town “See-Hear-Report” program, as Chief Nelson claims, might occasionally “save lives.” Yet it is certain to encourage petty snitching practices among students living in this low-crime recreational community of eleven thousand residents, particularly with the introduction of cash rewards.
Policing the Callers, Pranking the Police
In addition to providing important technical infrastructure for our current spy-and-snitch culture, the growth in Next-Generation 911 technologies has opened up the possibility of a more generalized climate of surveillance. As David Lyon reminds us, if our cell phones can be tracked by cops in an emergency, they can be tracked by cops in non-emergencies, too.65 Putting a finer point on the inherent dangers of geolocative 911, media theorist David Phillips warns: “despite the special purpose to which the 911 system is dedicated, the wireless 911 initiative has created the infrastructure for a general purpose locational surveillance infrastructure capable both of surveilling broad patterns of activities and of responding to particular individuals. Moreover, the infrastructure is more available to police agencies and to well-established and well-funded corporate entities than to grassroots organizations.”66 While it is difficult to disagree with Phillips’s critique of 911 technologies, it is also important to recognize how citizens have renegotiated this technical infrastructure in order to resist traditional forms of 911 citizenship.
Police departments have long exploited the surveillance potential of 911 technologies. As Richard Lindberg notes in his history of the Chicago Police Department, many police officials envisioned the early telegraph box as a way to ensure that lazy cops were walking their beats. Requiring cops to send telegraphs from specific locations at specified times allowed police administrations to keep an eye on their officers’ activities.67 Yet police agencies also used these technologies to track and identify civilians that reported crimes to the police. While the telegraph empowered trustworthy citizens to support police investigations and increase the department’s sensory reach, at the same time it allowed criminals and careless citizens to manipulate officers and waste police resources. So while the police wanted to open the lines of communication with citizens, they also strove to ensure that their own time wasn’t wasted by frivolous requests or bogus tips. A recurring trend in citizen-police communications, therefore, has been the development of surveillance mechanisms whereby police departments gather as much data as possible on 911 callers. In the early days of the telegraphic private box, for example, users had no expectation of anonymity because they could not remove their personally customized keys from the box’s lock. This tendency to carry out preventive surveillance on citizens who called the police has taken many forms: from the earliest days of the telephone, call takers have been under strict orders to gather as much information as possible about callers,68 and in most cases emergency calls have been geographically traceable. This surveillance has gradually reached a reflexive level of intensity: since the 1970s, when the telecommunications industry began to automatically determine the location of incoming calls to 911 (what is called “automatic location identification”), vocal speech has not even been required to set in motion a police response. Operational protocols require dispatchers to send officers to a home or business that has dialed 911, even if no human on the other end speaks (or even if they admit that they dialed 911 by mistake). This has been the case with cell phones since 1996, when providers were required to grant direct-access 911 capabilities along with GPS tracking of all incoming 911 calls. Now that more than ninety percent of American adults own cell phones,69 all callers need to do is dial 911 and push “Send” in order to initiate a GPS-coordinated police response. Yet even with all of these geolocative surveillance capabilities, 911 call takers are still drilled in conversation-based methods of personal data gathering: the NYPD, for example, requires 911 operators to ask callers as many as a dozen questions. They are required to ask about the caller’s exact location—including borough, cross streets, and apartment number—as well as her or his name and phone number. Operators are then required to verify all information before they are allowed to ask the nature of the emergency.70 Thus while 911 response times are still important to urban police departments, enforcing surveillance-oriented conversational protocols tops the police’s list of priorities.
In the eyes of the police, there are good reasons for all this preventive surveillance. Instead of using 911 Emergency like responsible citizens, many callers violate the protocols and responsibilities that have long characterized citizen-police communications. For example, because 911 calls from public booths cannot be easily tracked, they are popular tools for prank callers. Cop Block, one of the police resistance organizations discussed in the previous chapter, encourages citizens to exploit anonymous 911 technologies in order to discredit them as a tool of police power. According to a Cop Block activist, “Anonymous tips by telephone are a real danger for cannabis users, and they have to be stopped. The best way to stop anonymous tips is by calling in bogus or phony anonymous tips, and often. But doing this is not danger-free, and can lead to your incarceration. The idea is to have the cops go on so many fruitless phony tips calls that such calls will no longer be trusted, especially by judges issuing search warrants.”71 Cop Block then lists a number of steps that activists can take—such as always using a pay phone, spending as little time on the phone as possible, and informing the call taker that illegal activity is taking place at the house or business of a political enemy—to exasperate cops into ignoring anonymous tips.
These kinds of pranks, of course, are not the first of their kind. In the 1990s, when Sarah J. Tracy and Karen Tracy carried out their landmark ethnographic research on 911 communications, they reported that call takers receive a staggering proportion of prank calls from phone booths. As Tracy and Tracy document, many of these callers lash out at the police under the cover of anonymity, such as one caller who remarked: “Pigs . . . fuckin’ pieces of shit.”72 The caller immediately called back and shouted, “Fuckin’ pigs,” before once again hanging up the phone.73 The DOJ, however, doesn’t find such pranks very funny: these kinds of antics have led the department to classify the misuse and abuse of 911 “an urgent problem.”74 To respond to this problem, many local jurisdictions have used public service announcements and other outreach methods to educate citizens about improper uses of 911. A Franklin, Ohio, public service announcement, for example, warned children that “we know where you are” when you call 911, a campaign that, according to the Department of Justice, reduced the frequency of prank 911 calls.75
While these campaigns might reduce prank 911 calls, many people still use the citizen-police communications infrastructure to violate the norms and etiquettes of 911 citizenship. These trends illustrate not only how pranksters and resistance movements use 911 technologies to manipulate the state, but also how police agencies respond to these attacks by demanding enhanced powers to carry out surveillance on the population at large. For example, in June 2012 the North Hollywood Police Department received a call that a violent kidnapping was underway at pop star Miley Cyrus’s house, and that shots had been fired. A police helicopter and a dozen heavily armed officers converged on Cyrus’s multimillion-dollar compound, drawing their guns and creating a perimeter around the house.76 Yet they soon found out that Cyrus was not home, and that she had been “Swatted” (or “SWAT-ted”): that is, someone had used 911 technologies to dispatch a SWAT team to her house when no crime was actually taking place. Cyrus, they realized, was simply the latest celebrity target in a growing prank trend: Ashton Kutcher, Russell Brand, Magic Johnson, Selena Gomez, Paris Hilton, Ryan Seacrest, Justin Timberlake, Khloe Kardashian, and other Los Angeles pop culture favorites have also been Swatted by pranksters using 911 technologies.77 In 2012, the FBI estimated that there were about four hundred Swatting incidents in the United States annually, and that their numbers were on the rise.78
Sometimes Swatting pranks take on a more political bent, however. Erick Erickson, a neoconservative blogger and CNN contributor, was Swatted in May 2012. That night a caller contacted the sheriff’s office, claiming to be Erickson and informing the operator that he had just murdered his wife. After the operator asked for his phone number, the prankster said: “I don’t know. I guess you’re going to have to find out. I’m gonna—going to shoot someone else soon.”79 After the Swatter hung up the phone, the police used caller ID to trace the call to Erickson’s house, where an unknown number of officers proceeded to “take the house,” blocking off all exits and rushing the residence. Following the incident, some of Erickson’s friends in Congress decided that Swatting was a growing problem that deserved the special attention of the DOJ. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, a group of eighty GOP congresspersons urged the Obama administration to crack down on “these hate filled ploys.” According to the letter, which was penned by U.S. Representative Sandy Adams of Florida, “The use of SWAT-ting as a harassment tool is apparently not new, but its use as a tool for targeting political speech appears to be a more recent development. . . . During the last year, some of the more widely reported cases of SWAT-ting have taken place against blog operators across the country. . . . The emerging pattern is both disturbing and dangerous.”80 As Adams’s letter reveals, one of the reasons Swatting is so dangerous to the police and the political class is that Swatting technologies are notoriously difficult to trace. Many Swatters use Skype,81 the Internet-based telecom software that allows users to make video and audio calls, while others use Internet-based telephone hardware like magicJacks.82 These calls are highly difficult to track to specific users, as are other popular Swatting technologies that deploy Voice Over Internet Protocol programs (VOIPs). VOIPs allow users to coopt distant telephone networks, thus disguising their own telephone numbers and addresses and making a call’s origin virtually impossible to ascertain.83 Other popular Swatting technologies including teletype systems designed for deaf callers, as well as SpoofCards, which allow users to determined which phone number is displayed on the target’s Caller ID system.
These surveillance-busting measures have proven quite successful in throwing the police off the scent of cautious Swatters and other pranksters. In response, the police have taken defensive measures that illustrate just how important 911 is to the liberal policing project. Since its earliest days, 911 Emergency has been a tool by the state, for the state. In order for the police apparatus to function in its present form, citizens must see and say according to the strict protocols of the American social compact. To maintain a sparse, reactive police force based upon a model of liberal political economy, citizens must operate as reliable participants in the policing of the social order. If citizens fail in this essential civic responsibility of seeing and saying—if they withhold or manipulate intelligence, or if they mislead the police by providing false information—then the state will have to gradually abandon its own liberal rules of engagement, turning instead to enhanced police power and invasive surveillance, an excellent illustration of what David Lyon calls “surveillance creep.”84 As a response to Swatting, for example, police agencies and legislators have called for the intensified surveillance and tracking of popular communication channels, as well as a crackdown on “spoofing” technologies and other identification shielding products. These responses have included increased surveillance of IP Relay services,85 expansive new definitions of IP Relay fraud,86 enhanced civil and criminal penalties,87 as well as calls for making Swatting a federal offense.88 As Representative Adams demanded in her letter to Eric Holder, “These crimes are not to be tolerated and necessitate thorough examination at every level.”89
Finally, there is one more important site of 911 resistance that deserves our attention. One of the more provocative ways that responsible 911 citizenship is resisted is through defensive violence, which often serves as a critique of 911 technologies and their rituals of regulated state intervention. When victims of home invasions “stand their ground”—that is, when they shoot or otherwise attack invaders rather than simply calling 911—the question of 911 as an effective mediator of citizen violence comes to the fore. For example, in 2013 Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke sparked a national controversy when he urged citizens to arm themselves in anticipation of growing violence and crime. In a public service announcement targeted to his constituency, Clarke begins by telling his audience that he wants to talk about their safety: “It’s no longer a spectator sport; I need you in the game, but are you ready? With officers laid-off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option. You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back; but are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. We’re partners now. Can I count on you?”90 Clarke’s rhetoric about partnership, duty, and preparation are standard neoliberal fare, and this part of his message failed to elicit any public anger. What infuriated Clarke’s critics was that he urged citizens to be willing to transgress the communication/violence boundary in order to directly attack their fellow citizens. Not only did he encourage his constituents to take a firearms safety course, but he also made the provocative suggestion that calling 911—that communication—is often an inappropriate response, and that people should be prepared to commit defensive physical violence.
Clarke’s statement set off a bitter debate over the policing responsibilities of good citizens. Expectedly, much of the reaction was intensely negative. Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, called the ad “irresponsible,” while Jeri Bonavia, an activist with the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort, remarked: “I think he did a great disservice to the people of this community. . . . It’s encouraging people to take the law into their own hands or to only rely on themselves and not rely on trained law enforcement officers.”91 Bonavia made parallels between Clarke’s statement and the autonomous citizenship that prevailed in the vigilance era: “What [Clarke’s] talking about is this amped up version of vigilantism. . . . I don’t know what his motivations are for doing this. But I do know what he’s calling for is dangerous and irresponsible and he should be out there saying this is a mistake.”92 Roy Felber, president of the Milwaukee Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, invoked the sovereign exception in his criticism of Clarke: “That doesn’t sound smart. . . . That’s why society has police officers.”93 In a debate on the CNN evening program Piers Morgan Tonight, Mayor Barrett echoed these concerns, emphasizing that it was a citizen’s duty to contact authorities rather than take matters into her own hands: “We respond to anything. . . . The 911 calls from homes in the city of Milwaukee are responded to by the Milwaukee Police Department.”94 This controversy illustrates how surveillance and communication, through the mediation of 911 technologies, serve as a pivot point for the assertion of responsible citizenship. The question of violence, of course, repeatedly frames these questions of civic responsibility. For renegade sheriffs like David Clarke, good citizenship means being prepared to take the law into one’s own hands; for his critics, the key to civic duty lies in the telephone.
Conclusion
These struggles over the use and abuse of 911 illustrate the centrality of surveillance and communication as complementary sites of liberal governance. While the U.S. police apparatus has used 911 technologies to gradually democratize citizen participation in policing, police agencies have had to balance that extended access with increased surveillance and control. As this history shows, seeing/saying culture in America is about seeing and saying the right things. If a caller says the wrong thing—as with pranksters, Swatters, and others who violate the established protocols of citizen-police communications—then s/he will face severe penalties at the hands of the police and the justice system. Through restricted access, surveillance, technical and conversational protocols, and legal regulations, police have used 911 technologies as a means of surveilling and governing the social practices of witnesses, informants, and the public at large. This mass “democratization” of citizen-police communications, therefore, is more complicated and politically ambivalent than it seems at first glance.
Ultimately, the technologies and rituals through which we communicate with agents of the state help determine our relations with our protectors, leaders, and public servants. With the explosive growth of 911 technologies, the police have gradually found their way into the very depths of our local solidarity. As I will discuss in greater depth in the next chapter, our legal and cultural norms are heavily biased toward cultivating civic action that is highly restricted to disciplined acts of seeing and saying. Recent 911 outreach efforts emphasize the citizen’s embodied epistemological utility: programs like Los Angeles’s iWatch LA program, for example, openly ask citizens to lend their senses to the policing apparatus. As iWatch LA’s outreach urges, “Trust Your Instincts: We rely on our senses every day of our lives. If a behavior or activity makes you feel uncomfortable, report it!. . . . If it doesn’t look right, report it. . . . If it doesn’t smell right, report it. . . . If it doesn’t sound right, report it.”95 With the iWatch LA program and its companion efforts across the country—including iWatch Dallas, Eyes and Ears Kentucky, Colorado’s Recognizing Terrorism program, New York’s Operation Safeguard, and Pennsylvania’s Terrorism Awareness and Prevention Training program96—citizens’ eyes and ears are captured and put to use as mechanisms of lateral surveillance. Their mouths, as well, are transformed into instruments for reporting crimes and suspicious activities. And now, with the advent of ubiquitous computing, their dialing hands have become excellent tools for capturing and transmitting data—such as photographs of criminals and text messages with tips—to local police agencies. In many of the activities that bring the police into contact with the public, the citizen-subject is reduced to its barest biotechnical utility.
Reflecting on these political deployments of the body, Foucault recognized that human subjects “are not only [power’s] inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. . . . The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.”97 Today, these rituals of seeing and saying provide an important point of our social and political articulation. This technologization of the citizen gives rise to a situation that Torin Monahan has eloquently described: “By reducing people to instrumental objects, which are seen either as pawns to be manipulated or as receptacles of information that must be extracted, humanity is excised from the object and the subject. . . . Paradoxically, such practices are done in the name of preserving their opposite: civil society, human rights, political accountability, and democratic processes.”98 Transforming the citizen into an instrument of liberal political experiments is not only disempowering to those who are promised freedom through responsibilization; it also threatens the bedrock of social and political values to which that responsibilization appeals. This brand of civic responsibility, needless to say, is not affirmative of community or an emancipatory politics; rather, with the simultaneous rise of mobile technologies and neoliberal campaigns to empower citizens through lateral surveillance and snitching, we can see the outline of a pernicious form of communicative citizenship. Communication, paired with surveillance and stripped to its barest informational content, falls far short of its political promise. It appears, instead, as a means by which citizens fight against rather than for one another.