Observing the Observers

Surveillance & Society 3(2/3): 139-157
‘Doing Surveillance Studies’
Editors: K. Ball, K.D. Haggerty and J. Whitson
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/doing.htm
© 2005 Surveillance & Society and the author(s). All rights reserved. ISSN: 1477-7487
Observing the Observers: Researching
Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on ‘Skid
Row’.
Thomas Kemple1 and Laura Huey2
Abstract
Using empirical research drawn from field studies on the policing of ‘skid row’ communities, this paper
illustrates some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical problems that confront the researcher who
studies surveillance and counter-surveillance within these contested settings. We begin by noting how, with
the increasing use of the ‘broken windows’ policing model to regulate deviant individuals and to secure
derelict urban spaces, researchers may be implicated in the use of surveillance and counter-surveillance by
community stakeholders. Drawing examples from direct and covert field observations, field notes, and
photographs, we demonstrate that there is a significant potential for the researcher to become identified as
an agent of surveillance, and as a potential target of counter-surveillance, within such settings. We conclude
by considering some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical implications of the researcher’s
complicity in these dynamics for both the conduct of surveillance studies in general, and for urban fieldwork
in particular.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Who shall watch the watchers? - Juvenal)
Introduction
What has historically been referred to as ‘skid row’ is both a highly contested physical
space and an intensely conflicted moral order. Within these urban zones, drug dealers
fight turf wars, prostitutes vie for corners, while ‘respectable’ families and local
businesses launch community watches and neighborhood reclamation projects directed at
removing problematic ‘others.’ At the same time, public police and private security agents
attempt various measures to ‘take back’ the streets from targeted residents and community
groups who actively resist such efforts. The term ‘skid row’ has itself long been at the
center of conflicts over the naming of this space and the people who live there. These
battles are fought between neighborhood organizations, municipal authorities and a
1 Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
mailto:kemple@interchange.ubc.ca
2 Department of Criminology, Kwantlen University College, Surrey, B.C., Canada.
mailto:laurah@telus.net
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variety of other stakeholders (Huey and Kemple, 2005; Hasson and Ley, 1994: 189-201).
Such spatial, symbolic and political struggles render this area an important site in which
to study the use of low-level surveillance and counter-surveillance measures: to the extent
that disparate groups compete to stamp their social, political and/or economic agendas on
the physical location, they often use surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques as
components of their arsenals of domination and resistance. At the same time, the volatility
of these dynamics presents the urban field researcher with a number of methodological
and ethical challenges.
This essay discusses an important consideration arising from the surveillance researcher’s
function as an analyst of relations of power and knowledge within the contested physical,
cultural and moral space of ‘skid row.’ In particular it concentrates on how as a
consequence of conducting systematic disciplined observation of subjects in the field in
order to uncover the surveillance and counter-surveillance strategies used by others, the
researcher herself may become a subject of surveillance. Further, the intensity and
proximity of the researcher’s involvement in this field of observation may also lead her to
be identified as an agent of surveillance, and thus to become a potential target of countersurveillance.
The methodological, theoretical and ethical significance of this phenomenon
for the research process, understood as a form of social interaction and struggle in its own
right, has important implications for the conduct of surveillance studies in general, and of
urban field research in particular.
This paper is structure to follow two main axes of critical analysis and self-reflection.
First, after offering a brief introduction to the setting and subjects of the two empirical
studies from which we draw our observations, we develop a reflexive discussion of the
methods employed in this research in terms of how sociological observation may be
implicated in the surveillance strategy of so-called ‘broken windows’ policing. Second,
we situate recent developments in the policing of ‘skid row’ by illustrating the problem of
how the researcher may herself be positioned as the subject of surveillance or viewed as
an agent of counter-surveillance. In each instance we offer a critical analysis of first-hand
accounts from the field of how the sociological observer both studies and is immersed in
techniques of surveillance and counter-surveillance. A concluding section further
problematizes the methodological-epistemological and ethical-political implications of
this phenomenon for field study and considers the extent to which the issues we have
raised are unique to skid row research or whether they might be generalizable to other
aspects of surveillance studies.
Sociological Observation and ‘Broken Windows’ Surveillance
Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent
within all networks of practice. Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows
of everyday existence. The calculated modulation of conduct according
to principles of optimization of benign impulses and minimization of
malign impulses is dispersed across the time and space of ordinary life
(Rose, 1999: 234).
Among the several shades of meaning of the verb ‘to observe’ listed in Webster’s, perhaps
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the two most common usages are “to conform one’s action or practice” (i.e. to laws,
customs, ceremonies, or rules) and “to see or sense, esp. through directed careful analytic
attention” (i.e. to noted facts, evidence, knowable realities). It seems then that
observation, whether casual and ordinary or disciplined and professional, is inescapably
ingrained in relations of knowledge (especially when acquired through visual perception)
and power (particularly involving compliance with established conventions of authority).
This essay draws from two larger ethnographic studies of public and private policing in
so-called ‘skid row’ districts that exhibit each of these dimensions of observational
practice.3 What we call ‘the private security study,’ was conducted in 2000 and examined
the use of ‘broken windows-style’ policing by private security agents to regulate the
presence of suspicious or disorderly individuals in a gentrified area of Vancouver’s
historic ‘skid row’ district commonly referred to as Gastown (Huey, Ericson and
Haggerty, 2005). The second project, conducted in 2003 and referred to as ‘the public
policing study,’ explored the politics of public policing in skid row districts in the San
Francisco Tenderloin district, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Edinburgh’s Cowgate
and Grassmarket neighborhood (Huey, 2005). While the primary focus of both studies
was on the policing of skid row districts, a principal research goal in each was more
generally to examine the extent to which routine surveillance of target populations was
being undertaken by public and/or private policing agencies within these communities.
Although for the purposes of illustration in the present essay we draw mostly from the
relevant geographical, cultural and political particularities of the Vancouver site, it is
important to note that the other two sites exhibit similar characteristics with respect to the
composition of the population and the use of surveillance and counter-surveillance as a
means to control territory.
As surveillance is a broad concept used to describe a wide range of phenomena - from the
use of infrared technology in military helicopters to the ways in which individuals
routinely spy on their neighbors - we must also clarify our use of this term. Following
Gary Marx (2003: 370), we define surveillance as those technologies of visibility and
techniques of exposure that “seek to eliminate privacy in order to determine normative
compliance or to influence the individual” for particular aims or interests. Marx (2004:
276) further provides a useful contrast between ‘traditional surveillance,’ defined as
“close observation, especially of a suspected person,: and its new forms, which he
characterizes as “scrutiny through the use of technical means to extract or create personal
or group data, whether from individuals or contexts.” We are reporting on studies which
examined the use of relatively low-tech surveillance on skid row by police, private
security, and community watch groups, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
surveillance used by traditional targets of normative surveillance, including buyers and
sellers in the drug, prostitution and/or stolen goods markets, and other individuals
similarly defined as ‘deviant others.’ Here our concern is less with the extension or
intensification of sophisticated surveillance techniques as such (for example, in the
3 As the present essay is about performing research in a particular type of contested territory, our use of the
morally freighted and stigmatized term ‘skid row’ is a deliberate choice. In using it we draw explicit
attention to the historic and contemporary association of particular geographical and social locations with
predominant moral attitudes that lead to the social neglect and/or harsh treatment of citizens. Also, since
fieldwork for both studies was conducted by Laura Huey, in what follows we use the feminine pronoun
when referring to ‘the researcher’ in the field, even when this term is used generically.
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interests of business or government) than with the asymmetrical, anonymous, and nonreciprocal
surveillance of vulnerable or suspicious social groups in public spaces. What
these practices share is the use of surveillance techniques and strategies for: 1) classifying
and interpellating identities within a moralized physical space, for example to distinguish
‘good’ residents (and/or others who use these spaces) and zones from those designated as
‘bad,’ and 2) fostering compliance with a particular set of normative values in that space.
Rather than follow the lead of other researchers who have focused on these contested
fields of surveillance and counter-surveillance themselves (Marx, 2003: Lyon, 2002;
Staples, 2000), our primary aim is to examine the extent to which the research enterprise
itself - through direct observation, note-taking, photography, and the subsequent
accumulation and analysis of visual and recorded data - is inextricably embedded within
similar and overlapping relations of power and knowledge.
A total of 161 individuals identified as stakeholders were interviewed for both studies.
They were selected because they were identified as different forms of stakeholders with
an interest in these spaces. This included ‘street level’ users of these spaces (including 46
area residents, 14 business owners and 8 tourists), front-line professionals (including 46
police officers and private security agents and 36 members of community groups), and
civic officials (8 individuals). At the risk of oversimplification, we characterize these
various stakeholders in terms of their location within a broader set of practices that have
come to be referred to as the ‘broken windows’ strategy of maintaining law and order.
‘Broken windows’ policing was initially promoted over twenty years ago on the
assumption that minor infractions, or more precisely, the visible signifiers of decay and
neglect such as litter, graffiti, and broken windows tend to produce criminogenic effects
including theft, prostitution, and drug-trafficking. When combined, these behaviors
increase and legitimate the fears of ‘respectable’ citizens (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). The
view that minor incivilities lead to major crimes is itself based on the assumption that
visual environmental cues mark a territory as ‘undefended’ and therefore lacking in social
controls. This approach has since been expanded from an informal policing policy to a
more generalized civic strategy of surveillance and counter-surveillance (Johnston and
Shearing, 2003: 102; Huey, Ericson and Haggerty, 2005). Public police, private security
officers, and civic officials have increasingly favored the ‘recruitment’ of area residents,
business owners, and community groups to help produce the outward appearance of order
and to regulate images of disorder on skid row (Ellickson, 1996; Kelling and Coles,
1996). Beyond the institutionally sanctioned efforts of public police and private security
officers, various community members have been solicited to participate in a wide range of
practices of impression-management and social control. These can entail acts such as
removing delinquents from public places, informing on criminals, or simply assisting the
disadvantaged and keeping a watch on ‘deviants’ in the area. ‘Broken windows’ then is
not just a reactive zero-tolerance policing strategy that makes use of coercive force; it may
also (or alternatively) involve pre-emptive ceremonial displays of symbolic power.
Figure 1 displays these modes of adaptation and resistance imaginatively in the form of a
‘window’ onto the contested social field of ‘skid row surveillance.’ Here ‘order’ refers to
the culturally prescribed goal of this strategy as it is normally defined in terms of middle
class standards of consumption and socially dominant values of decorum, civility and
respectability. ‘Law’ is understood as the institutionally legitimized means for achieving
this goal as it is formally defined by legislative statutes that are enforced by public
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authorities, or as it is informally upheld by various private and other public agents who
may or may not be authorized to operate in an official capacity. When arranged to suggest
the coordinates of a grid (the heuristic device suggested by Figure 1), ‘law’ and ‘order’
represent a virtual frame for how the social space of ‘skid row’ is occupied by differently
located social actors operating across a range of conflicting or complementary
relationships.4
ORDER
(Cultural Goal)
+
LAW
(institutional means) + –
–
+ = relative access to or observance of goals and/or means
– = relative lack of access to or observance of goals and/or means
Figure 1: ‘Broken Windows’ as a Strategy of (Counter-)Surveillance on ‘Skid Row’
In documenting the activities of mobile police patrols, neighbourhood watch programs
and business improvement associations, other commentators have examined the ‘broken
windows’ ideology specifically as a tactic of zero-tolerance law enforcement, as a
cornerstone of so-called ‘community policing,’ or as an aspect of urban gentrification
(Johnston and Shearing, 2003: 102; Huey, Ericson and Haggerty, 2005). By contrast, our
objective here is to highlight the broader pattern by which observers themselves come
under the gaze of observation within the contested space of interactions between
institutional and individual agents on ‘skid row.’
To be implemented effectively, ‘broken windows’ does not necessarily have to be
formally sanctioned by legal statutes or officially recognized by the police. This method
of maintaining order may also be informally enforced by security guards or merely
socially approved by various social and knowledge workers, the latter term interpreted
broadly to cover a range of public and private professionals (sometimes including
academic researchers, a point we return to in the following section) concerned with
collecting and sharing information on individuals and groups for various purposes. At
the same time, understood as a multifaceted strategy of surveillance and countersurveillance,
‘broken windows’ may also be honoured or observed – if only in the breach
4 This schema is loosely inspired by Merton’s (1957) classic typology of modes of individual adaptation,
which he illustrates with reference to the broader American value-system that places a high premium on
the goal of success through wealth. Here we narrow his frame of reference to focus specifically on the
social structural strains and anomic cultural patterns on ‘skid row,’ which for the most part Merton
characterizes in terms of the pattern of ‘retreatism.’ For a fuller discussion of Merton’s general theory,
including his displacement of the adaptation pattern of ‘rebellion’ (as well as social transformation and
revolution) to a ‘residual category,’ (see Kemple, 2004: 7-10).
public police/ private security/
criminals delinquents
social workers/ knowledge workers/
disadvantaged deviants
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– by numerous individuals who may not acknowledge or have direct access to the
dominant codes of law and order, including those individuals who are its primary targets.
For example, in the interests of maintaining order (at the ‘upper half’ of the diagram), the
police are officially charged with keeping a close watch on suspected criminals, who
attempt in turn to slip under their gaze, while private security officers stand guard against
the covert and unruly actions of delinquents, who likewise try to elude them. In each
instance, the identities of the various actors are mutually defined or undermined by their
conflictual relationships and asymmetrical interactions with one another. By contrast, at
the ‘lower half’ of this social space, other stakeholders may have more pressing concerns
than upholding law and order, such as alleviating deprivations, reducing harm, or
managing dependencies. For example, social workers are typically charged with looking
out for the interests of disadvantaged (who are then expected to look after themselves),
while knowledge workers of various kinds are expected to gather information on deviants
(which may then be put to use in rehabilitating or normalizing them), regardless of
whether these individuals are engaging in criminal or disorderly conduct. These
designations then should not be understood as psychological states or character roles but
rather as patterns of interaction and as locations within a social field. In particular, they
refer to relations of exposure and (in)visibility, and of domination and (in)subordination,
in which individuals may be engaged simultaneously or in succession at various times and
depending on the circumstances. Thus, each of the stakeholders in the space depicted here
can assume a fluid range of perspectives (or ‘windows’) on the field. Consequently, figure
1 does not represent fixed points on a map but offers a compass for navigating through the
moving equilibrium of interests and shifting practices of surveillance and countersurveillance
on ‘skid row’ (cf. Marx, 2004).
When the researcher enters this highly charged field of observation, she is necessarily and
inextricably implicated in this grid of relationships. Fieldwork and observational research
for the two ethnographic studies under consideration consisted primarily of touring the
site (alone or with police or community outreach workers) or taking up a stationary
position in public space to document physical and social landmarks and the ordinary lives
of inhabitants and their interactions. In most instances the researcher simply sat or stood
while quietly observing the people and the surroundings, sometimes taking notes or the
occasional photograph. For the policing study if someone asked about her note-taking she
explained the nature the research being conducted in general terms. On a few occasions,
typically involving the observation of police activities, if the meaning of what she was
witnessing was unclear, she would approach an officer, briefly describe her research
project and ask for clarification. For the private security study she also undertook covert
observation of security agents on patrol in public spaces. Thus, alongside the usual
innocuous kinds of ‘vernacular watching’ that typically characterize urban life (often
accompanied by the boredom and distraction experienced while waiting for ‘something to
happen’) the disciplined observation of the researcher routinely entails modes of apparent
voyeurism and ‘suspicious looking’ that often resemble the practices of surveillants and
others engaged in the visual documentation of social space. For this reason, the researcher
cannot avoid being positioned as a ‘visual subject’ in the field, that is, as an agent of sight
(regardless of her physical ability to see) whose identity is constituted in large part by
categories of (reciprocal) visuality, (mutual) observation, and/or (counter)-surveillance
(cf. Mirzoeff, 2002).
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Many of these issues are graphically displayed in Illustration 1, an otherwise
unremarkable photograph taken in the course of the private security study and which
depicts a security guard questioning a local resident. Considered both in the context of the
present paper and in its original setting, the photograph is as interesting for what it
conceals as for what it reveals. In contrast to the activist or inflammatory intentions of
photojournalism, the ethical conventions of social science research require researchers to
alter the image to conceal the identities of the two individuals depicted. At the same time,
the perspective assumed by the researcher/photographer also hides the technical and
human conditions of the image’s production, including the presence of the camera and of
the photographer herself in this scene. Despite being ‘off-stage’ and ‘out-of-frame,’ these
features of the image are indicative of the visual organization of the observational
relationship with its alternation between overt activity and action incognito.
Acknowledging these aspects of visual documentation also helps us to expose the paradox
of photography in attempting to capture social reality by framing and immobilizing a
moment - perceived as ‘now/here’ - within a succession of events (Becker, 1995). Thus,
the particular physical and cultural boundaries of the area are ‘screened’ out of this image
- such as the broader context of the ‘broken windows’ style of order-maintenance that had
recently been intensified in this highly touristed and increasingly gentrified part of
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside - and so too is the sequence of encounters of which this
is only a frozen moment (a point we return to in the next section).
Figure 1: Security guard questioning a resident in Gastown, Vancouver (Photo: L. Huey)
Covert observation as a research strategy requires subjects either to be unaware of the fact
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that they are being observed, or to be unaware of the true purpose of that observation
(Bowling, 1997). In the private security study, guards were covertly observed from either
fixed vantage points (sidewalk benches, café seats, bus stops, etc.) or were discretely
followed while on patrol. As guard patrols took place in public spaces in a tourist district,
the researcher frequently dressed in shorts and carrying a camera as a way to blend in with
the crowds of vacationing tourists (a deception that was not always successful, as we
discuss below). In light of the ethical questions and methodological problems raised by
several critics of the use of covert observation in the field (Lauder, 2003; Elms, 1994;
Bulmer, 1982; Cassell, 1982), it is reasonable to ask why discrete surveillance of security
guards on patrol is worth conducting as part of the fieldwork exercise.
One answer to this question is that in contested urban spaces, especially those
characterized by high levels of crime, poverty, and insecurity and which are subject to
unusually high levels of social control and regulation, it is not only addicts, prostitutes,
pimps, drug dealers and ‘deviant others’ who may wish to keep certain activities hidden
from public scrutiny. For example, the private security study was initiated at the request
of a local community group who wished to examine the use of security agents as a
mechanism for pushing the area’s poor out of the neighborhood. Community residents
advised that overt conspicuous forms of surveillance were being employed by guards as a
means of harassing panhandlers and other disadvantaged residents (including homeless,
unemployed, physically disabled and mentally ill people), and thus to induce them to
abandon their use of public space. To the extent that these activities infringe upon the
rights of some of the most vulnerable or oppressed urban inhabitants, the use of covert
observation can be justified as necessary to expose activities which harm or oppress
disadvantaged groups (Bok, 1978; Warwick, 1973). Such scrutiny reduces the likelihood
that those being observed would alter their activities and gets around the tendency for
people to deny such behavior in interviews (Turnock and Gibson, 2001). Thus, in
instances where dense networks of control and multiple techniques of monitoring envelop
virtually anyone who enters the field of observation, covert research ‘may be the only way
to develop accurate descriptions that are not affected by deliberate distortions, biased
recollections, or outright denial’ (Reynolds, 1982: 185). It may also help develop new
perspectives on repressive relations and power structures.
A further consideration with respect to the use of covert methods concerns the claim that
the inability to secure informed consent when using this strategy results in an invasion of
subjects’ privacy, thereby intensifying the anxiety and suspicion that citizens feel in a
world that is perceived as increasingly subjected to information gathering and surveillance
practices (Bulmer, 1980; 1982). All observational research for both studies occurred in
public space, where the activities of those observed were potentially observable by
anyone in this environment. At different times this might include several or several
hundred individuals. As Homan (1980) suggests, individual and group expectations of
privacy are considerably lessened when they operate within public forums, and thus
where observers themselves may be the objects of observation. In the following section,
we turn our attention to how this situation also poses significant methodological (as well
as ethical) problems for the researcher when she is positioned as a target of surveillance or
identified as an agent of (counter-)surveillance. In the concluding section we return to the
question of whether these concerns point to what may be a more general structural
dimension of social life beyond the contingent aspects of sociological research. If, as
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Niklas Luhmann (2002: 87) remarks, the inherent paradox of observation is that it ‘has to
operate unobserved in order to be able to cut up the world,’ then the observation of
observation is indispensable in understanding or rethinking such divisions.
The Sociologist as Subject and Agent of (Counter-)Surveillance
Knowing that targets of surveillance may respond in kind also can be a
factor limiting or inhibiting the initial use of surveillance… Certainly
there is greater equality in access to and use of surveillance technologies
today than in much of recorded history. However, we are certainly far
from equivalence here. The kind of technologies that are developed, apart
from who has them, is also much affected by inequality of resources
(Marx, 2003: 384).
In the preceding discussion, we noted some of the ways in which field observations, can
involve fairly routine activities of watching and asking, as well as the more systematic
labour of tracking, recording, exposing, and documenting. These may require the use of
techniques of concealment, disguise and anonymity not unlike those employed by other
forms of surveillance. Of course, these techniques are normally part of an assemblage of
analytical and observational methods which entail varying degrees of distance and
contact, intimacy and objectivity, and may include surveys, interviews and psychological
tests with their attendant audio and visual recording devices. Gary Marx’s comment above
regarding the increasing democratization of surveillance techniques (or at least their
broader dissemination) points not only to the persistence of their unequal distribution and
intensification but also to the potential for their neutralization or even subversion. The
employment of counter-surveillance, as practiced in the communities we discuss here as
well as in other social locations, thus can represent attempts to expose power asymmetries
through the tactical use or disruption of surveillance techniques (Monahan, forthcoming).
Rather than focus on the full array of these tactics of resistance and subversion, here we
wish to examine the implications for field research when the observer is not only
positioned as an active (and anonymous) surveillant, but also identified as an object of
suspicion and targeted as a possible agent of (counter-) surveillance.
The reality of fieldwork in contested spaces is that on particular occasions an apparently
disengaged observer frequently becomes part of the research setting through her
immersion in the dynamics of exposure and concealment that characterize the field, and
may thereby become an interactant with those who occupy these spaces. Her
embeddedness is revealed as a consequence of the fact that all strangers in such sites are
frequently subjected to varying levels of surveillance aimed at determining: 1) their
identity, and thus 2) their potential threat to the observer and/or to others. In order to trace
the effects of these interactions on the meaning and outcome of the research process, in
what follows we examine three illustrations of a researcher’s interactions in the field. In
view of the preceding discussion it is perhaps significant that each of these encounters
happen to break off through the medium of a window: at a café, through a camera lens,
and on a bus.
For skid row denizens and other residents of the street, strangers can represent a possible
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source of danger to their businesses and to the conduct of other everyday activities. This
potential threat is compounded in those instances when unknown individuals are spotted
engaging in what appears to be more than casual watching. Typically police and social
workers have sought to keep watch over skid row population in attempts to normalize
‘deviant others’ through coercive social work or spotting (potential) criminals for
punishment by the justice system. Today, however, most residents are also aware that
fellow neighbors, local workers, and business owners are being recruited into becoming
willing surveillants and police informers, that is, into contributing to ‘the broken
windows’ model as ‘responsibilized’ citizens (O’Malley, 1992; Garland, 1996). Careful
scrutiny and identification of strangers by street residents themselves thus serves as a
means of self-protection from the prying eyes of state authorities and the private
institutions through which these authorities increasingly work.
An incident from the field - which might otherwise be regarded as too bizarre to be
relevant to the analytical aims of a research project - serves to illustrate the embeddedness
of the surveillance researcher within these contexts. During the spring of 2003 the
Vancouver Police Department implemented a policing program, the City-wide
Enforcement Teams (CET), which resulted in a public crackdown of the open-air drug
market in its skid row district (the Downtown Eastside, or DTES). Throughout the
summer of 2003, CET teams created an expanded and very visible police presence
throughout the DTES: walking in pairs, on horseback, on motorcycles, bicycles, and in
patrol cars, police used overt surveillance to break up pockets of the local drug market.
An examination of CET both as an actual surveillance strategy and as a symbolic display
of panoptic power formed a part of the larger public policing study. Over the course of
several afternoons, fieldwork consisted of discrete but mostly overt observation of police
observing (and being observed by) area residents. The following excerpts from field notes
were taken while on break at a nearby coffee shop:
Writing up field notes in a coffee shop on Hastings [Street]. Female
addict walks in and approaches. It is clear that she is ‘dual-diagnosis’
[addicted and mentally ill]. The conversation is strange. She has seen my
notes and wants to know what I’m doing. I explain that I’m doing
research on how the police treat people in her community. She becomes
suspicious and angrier. She demands money. She tells me that she thinks
I’m a ‘narc,’ and is going to tell her friends about me. She asks for
money again, and when I say ‘no,’ she calls me a ‘narc’ in a loud voice
(so that others in the restaurant can hear) and storms out the door. To find
her friends, she says. She stares at me in the restaurant window for a
minute, and then walks away. This is a serious threat. I quickly leave
before she comes back
(field notes, August 15, 2003).
Although the peculiar features of this incident should not be underplayed, in view of the
fairly common spectacle of uniformed patrol squads in this area (as depicted in
Illustration 1 for instance) and sometimes plainclothes officers taking notes about
suspicious people, the woman in the coffee shop had good reason to identify the
researcher as a surveillant. While the technologies employed by the researcher were fairly
unsophisticated (her gaze and pen and paper) the range of meanings behind their potential
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use was unmistakable to any observer in this highly charged though otherwise ordinary
space. Despite repeated attempts by the research to explain the nature of her project, the
woman persisted in misidentifying the role of the researcher: that is, as a police informant
rather than as a sociological observer. At the same time, however, the researcher was able
to instantly arrive at and sustain a view of the woman (whether correctly or not) as ‘a
female addict’ and as ‘dual diagnosis,’ and thus to characterize her staring through the
restaurant window as a potentially ‘serious threat.’ Once the identities of each participant
in the encounter are assigned in this way, the subsequent interaction and its outcome (the
woman yelling, the researcher escaping) seem to be virtually assured. If we return to the
surveillance schema represented in Figure 1 (particularly the lower right quadrant), we
can see how both the identity and the security of observer and observed may be
challenged or established on the basis of their (presumed or actual) mutual knowledge and
ignorance of their respective social location within the space.
The sociological observer in the field ostensibly seeks to acquire knowledge of social
processes. Her goal is not to affirm or support the cultural goal (order) of the setting under
examination or to affirm or support the institutional means of meeting this goal (law).
Rather it is to sustain an interest in disinterestedness, that is, to engage as much in
participant observation as in participant objectification. Her task is to expose the ways in
which human subjects are transformed into objects of power and knowledge, including
how this transformation takes place through the process of research itself (Bourdieu,
2004). Whatever her moral sympathies or political commitments, the researcher does not
need to have access to or endorse the goals and means (the subcultural values or official
institutions) that define the field of study. In employing surveillance techniques as a
strategy for gathering information for research purposes, she may nevertheless be seen to
operate as a ‘deviant’ counter-surveillant in a relation of opposition to the established
codes of law and order. In part, this perception arises from the circumstance that, as a
‘knowledge worker,’ her primary location in the field is not as an informant working on
behalf of authorities charged with enforcing law and maintaining order in this setting.
Rather, as an academic researcher (in fact, one of many who have turned their gaze on
‘skid row’ since the early days of urban sociology) she is also an actor within the
university field, particularly insofar as her notes and analyses (for example) are employed
for the accumulation of educational capital or in gaining symbolic recognition through
publication.
The potential misidentification of the researcher as a formal agent of surveillance – as a
‘narc’ – encompasses a range of potentially serious methodological as well as ethical
implications for the conduct and outcome of research on skid row. As in other
communities, police on ‘the skids’ function on behalf of the goal of order. Those seen as
being ‘on the other side,’ as one addict interviewed referred to her ‘deviant’ status (or in
other words, as occupying the ‘lower end’ of the slash in each of the quadrants of Figure
1), are the usual targets of police surveillance, often leading to the loss of their livelihood,
to their eventual arrest, or even to ‘starlighting’ (the practice of dumping a suspected
criminal or disorderly person in another part of the city, or sometimes outside city limits).
As a consequence, individuals identified as ‘narcs’ may find themselves subjected to
‘preventative’ or retributive treatment from other individuals in this community
(Rosenfeld, Jacobs and Wright, 2003). In the course of conducting fieldwork in San
Francisco’s Tenderloin district, for example, an undercover police officer working a lowKemple
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150
level drug buying operation was stabbed by a drug dealer who had identified him as a
police officer. As such incidents were not uncommon in the areas where interviews and
field observations are being conducted (within two or three blocks, in the San Francisco
case), the researcher had to take seriously the types of accusatory threats like those posed
by the woman in the coffee shop. Nevertheless, insofar as knowledge-gathering activities
in ‘skid row’ neighborhoods (including those contributing to university based projects)
are frequently viewed with confusion and distrust, it is unlikely that even a correct
perception of the researcher’s intentions (in this instance, as suggested perhaps in the
woman’s initial demand for money) would be enough to erase all suspicions.
In light of the possibility that the researcher may be mistakenly identified as an informer
by skid row residents, it is somewhat ironic that, under the banner of ‘broken windows,’
she may also find herself treated as a potential threat to middle class community order. As
noted above, ‘broken windows’ is deployed not just as a model for training police and
security guards to scrutinize spaces for criminogenic cues, but also as a framework for
maintaining the appearance of civic order as it is normatively defined by values and
meanings found predominately in white middle-class neighborhoods (Huey, Ericson and
Haggerty, 2005; Harcourt, 2001). In the process, a variety of civic agents are
‘responsibilized’ to adopt and promote this narrowly defined goal in informal ways (such
as casual or conspicuous observation of one’s neighbors) and through formal channels
(for example, association and support for institutionalized surveillance programs,
including policing and private security systems). Thus, residents seen as ‘disorderly’ or as
threats to newly imposed community norms are likely to find themselves not only under
the gaze of security guards and police officers, but also under the watchful eyes of
neighbors, area workers and local businesses.
During fieldwork for the private security study, evidence of how surveillance practices
can become an aspect of ‘broken windows’-inspired vigilance was acquired firsthand
when the researcher found herself targeted as a potential threat to community security. In
this second example, she was conducting routine fieldwork by visually documenting
aspects of the built environment with a camera, as described in the following field notes:
Have located the Community Police Office. It is closed. I attempt to take
a picture of it, but have difficulty due to the glare of the glass. As I
maneuver around trying to take a picture, I observe a man watching me
with interest. I give up on the photo and move to the corner of Abbott
and Water streets. The man follows me and continues to observe me. I
stand there for a couple of minutes to see what he will do. He stands
there and watches me. I decide to turn west and move on. While
watching a guided tour group, I notice the same man is walking towards
me from the west side of the street (he must have taken a short cut). He
sees me and stops. I make deliberate eye contact. I continue walking, he
continues following me. I dart into a store and look at items for a
moment, check the store window and see that he is looking in. I exit and
continue walking. As he is still following me, I decide to walk to an area
where I can sit down and observe the length of Water Street. I sit down
and take out my camera. He stops twenty or so feet away from me,
directly in my line of sight. I line up a camera shot and as he attempts to
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move out of camera range I take his picture [Figure 2]. He then moves
away … suspect that he is security personnel … the technique he used is
similar to that of the security guards: overtly follow a target, but don’t
make contact (intimidation)
(field notes of June 17, 2000).
The suspicion that this individual had received security training was supported in the
course of a subsequent interview with a police officer who promotes ‘broken windows’
policing through his training of community patrols designed to protect area businesses. In
the officer’s view it was likely this individual was a local merchant seeking to prevent a
potential burglary. This speculation was subsequently confirmed when the researcher
recognized the mystery surveillant behind the counter of a local shop. As the officer
explains,
One of the guys that I supervised as a civilian in the Crime Watch, he
helped those guys out and he created the Gastown patrol. I know that the
training that he got, he did share with [area merchants]. And a lot of it
was training in lower level observation. So I can see the guy circling the
block. He’s probably thinking about how clever he is (laughs).
Illustration 2: Mystery surveillant, Gastown (photo: L. Huey).
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This encounter allows us to appreciate how actions that otherwise appear innocuous (or
ridiculous) may be viewed through the lens of ‘the broken windows theory’ as (potential)
threats to the dominant order. The merchant in this example sees himself as working on
behalf of community security. Moreover, he is using what he believes to be socially
sanctioned means in support of this goal - after all, his training has come courtesy of the
local police department (through the auspices of the local community watch group)
which clearly has a vested interest in increasing the number of ‘eyes and ears’ on the
street (Harcourt, 2001). That the target of his observation happened to be what the police
would view as a ‘legitimate’ space user (in this case, a law abiding citizen engaged in
authorized academic research) rather than the illegitimate target that the man suspected
her to be, serves as a source of amusement for the officer (an advocate of this policing
system) rather than as a cautionary tale illustrating the perils of unrestrained surveillance.
At the same time, the incident inadvertently illustrates how the academic researcher
herself, especially when equipped with a camera and defying intimidation, may be
suspiciously viewed as a potentially subversive agent of counter-surveillance.
A third example of the treatment of the skid row researcher within this context further
illustrates the possible implications of her identification as a counter-surveillant, in this
case with respect to those functioning as formal agents of surveillance. As noted above,
during the private security study, the surveillance activities of security guards were
routinely documented in notes and occasionally in photographs. While taking the
photograph discussed in the previous section depicting a security guard questioning a
local resident (see Figure 1), fellow officers were alerted to the presence of the suspicious
activities of the photographer/researcher who was accidentally caught in the act of
observing and recording the officer’s observations. The following excerpt is from field
notes taken immediately after the researcher was spotted by the guard:
I see that the guard is there. He is talking on a walky-talky. He seems to
be observing me, but is not approaching … I have definitely been
spotted. I decide to cross the street and I see the male guard is now with
the female guard. I cross the street to observe them. They are standing
almost directly across the street from me and are both directly watching
me and taking notes. I feel that they are trying to intimidate me. I
continue to watch and take notes. A bus comes and I head towards it. The
female guard leaves. The male guard stays on spot, taking notes. I board
the bus. He watches me through the bus window. I wave to him. No
response.
(field notes of May 30, 2000).
While studying the use of overt surveillance techniques by guards directed at local
residents, the researcher became identified by the guards as a counter-surveillant, and
therefore as an object of concern. At one level the identification was correct: in this
situation, through the use of what were (up to this point) covert observation techniques,
the researcher was evidently operating as a counter-surveillant. However, as in the
preceding examples, her purpose was misrecognized as a potential threat to order or to
their ability to carry out their mandate to uphold a commercially defined normative order
in this space. As with the two preceding examples, the researcher’s activities were
misunderstood as a result of the suspicions that attach to the use of observation techniques
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by differently situated actors within this contested space. The broken windows model of
upholding community order, with its emphasis on proliferating the conspicuous
surveillance of activities within an area, exacerbates the underlying tensions within this
community through the requirement that all activities and individuals that do not conform
to dominant normative expectations be treated as objects of suspicion. Ironically, the
researcher might also have appeared to each party as fulfilling a function that either would
view as legitimate and potentially useful to their interests, for example, as an informant
with evidence of criminal activity or an activist documenting police abuse. In any case,
even when an academic observer is removed from these conflicts she may still be caught
in the intersection of gazes, and thus embedded in the knowledge base and power-network
of surveillance and counter-surveillance, that constitutes this space.
Conclusion: Sociological Reflexivity and the Politics of Research on ‘Skid
Row’
[In control societies], individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses
become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’ … Disciplinary man produced
energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among
a continuous range of different orbits
(Deleuze 1995: 180).
Our discussion of the serious game of hide and seek that is sometimes played between a
variety of stakeholders on ‘skid row’ needs to be placed within the context of both the
broader theoretical questions that are raised by sociological observation, as well as some
of the specific ethical issues posed by the unique features of this space. In one of his last
comments on the ‘reflexive problem’ in sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (2004: 86, 89)
provides a useful introduction to these questions with regard to what he refers to as the
constitution of a sociological ‘vision of reality’ and the composition of a scientific ‘point
of view’:
To bring to light what is ‘the hidden’ par excellence, what escapes the
gaze of science because it is hidden in the very gaze of the scientist, the
transcendental unconscious, one has to historicize the subject of
historicization, to objectivate the subject of the objectivation … To be
able to apply to their own practice the objectivation techniques that they
apply to the other sciences, sociologists have to convert reflexivity into a
disposition constitutive of their scientific habitus, a reflexivity reflex.
Bourdieu’s suggestion that the action and location of the sociological enterprise can be
illuminated by the historicizing and objectivizing methods of science entails
acknowledging the research situation itself as a mode of social interaction in its own right.
That is, the sociological perspective, what he refers to as the ‘principles of vision and
division’ of its ‘scientific habitus,’ consists of a distinctive disposition that is cultivated
and constrained within overlapping fields of social interaction, competence, and power
relations. As Luhmann (2002) might point out, the examples we have cited above suggest
that the irreducible blind spot of sociology may well be the systematic organization of its
own observational gaze, or at least the visual organization of the social and cultural fields
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it both inhabits and examines. For this reason, rather than attempting to reconcile the
polarized attitudes of objectivism versus subjectivism, or even of passionate engagement
versus cool detachment, our aim here has been to exercise this ‘reflexivity reflex’ by
exposing how these tensions are often bound up with powerful patterns of revelation and
concealment that are sometimes beyond our ability to fully account for or control.
As the above illustrations suggest, the limits of scientific objectification are also the limits
of disciplined observation, at least as long as the methodological procedures such
observation entails are carried out according to a sociological project within contemporary
settings that are already thoroughly surveyed and ‘sociologised.’ Not only are social
groups often made ‘knowable’ under the gaze of social science through the application of
discrete classification systems, but such information can also be accumulated, checked,
stored, retrieved and compared for use in assessing the risks and opportunities these
groups may pose (Lyon, 2002: 3). Institutional and informal techniques of sociological
observation and everyday surveillance increasingly overlap with and reinforce one
another when human subjects are documented, interviewed, photographed, and profiled,
often with the aim of controlling or intervening in the daily conduct of their affairs in a
‘neutral’ way or ‘at a distance.’ H. T. Wilson (2004: 296) has commented on this feature
of social science research as constitutive of the institutions that support it:
The social, behavioural, and administrative/managerial sciences have become part of the
institutional structure of the advanced societies… Nowadays these disciplines serve as a
model for social practice rather than simply a way of studying the nature of commonsense
activities that take place independently of their interests and values. In effect, they have
become a veritable force of production in their own right, all the more successful in this
endeavor where the fact of their influence has been muted by internalized acceptance of
their commitment to observe, record, even intervene sine ira et studio.
The social sciences are increasingly in a position to offer legitimacy and rationality to
procedures of gathering data, examining evidence, reporting information, and formulating
classifications that are integral to the routine operation of non-academic institutions, both
public and private. Such methods may be mobilized to contribute to governmental
objectives of coercion and normalization, for example, or they may be redeployed
collaboratively in an effort to account for and transform conventional ways of
accumulating social, educational and professional capital (Wilson, 2004: 313-327;
Culhane, 2003/04). In any case, neither scenario can avoid the fact that the research
enterprise itself is implicated in relations of mutual observation or even in techniques of
(counter-)surveillance that have ethical and not simply theoretical implications.
The insuperable challenge for researchers immersed in a precariously configured setting
like ‘skid row’ is that many of the people and places in question are themselves subject to
imperatives of mobility and transience that are enforced in large part by the police and
other agents of order: “The police are primarily concerned with making manifest what is
there, or rather, what is not there: ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see”’ (Rancière, 1998:
242). At the risk of being positioned as an agent of social control or targeted as a subject
of surveillance, the researcher assumes a position within this circulating flux of observers
observing observers being observed. There is a sense in which modern social science and
modern surveillance were each from their earliest days a means of ‘keeping tabs on the
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mobile,’ and yet today both are components in a much larger assemblage and part of the
flow (Lyon, 2002: 3; Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). Among the ironies of the supposed
‘democratization of surveillance’ is that many of the most marginalized and mobile
subjects of observation are already hypervisible and hypervigilent by virtue of their lack
of access to private and protected places, and yet at the same time they remain largely
unseen and unaccounted for, forgotten and unheard from (Archand, 1979). To understand
the conditions that unequally affect the most vulnerable, exposed and invisible urban
dwellers, and to reconfigure what there is to see and do in the spaces we share, researchers
can move beyond simply observing, enumerating and documenting only by
acknowledging the dialectic of visibility and invisibility which envelops the lives of each
and everyone of us.
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