Detecting Intrusion: Electronic Security, Sensoriality, and Spatial Relations in Kingston, Jamaica

ABSTRACT In Kingston, Jamaica, decades of high crime coupled with the failure of the state to effectively provide public security have given rise to a booming private security industry. In this landscape, middle‐ and upper‐class residents have turned to electronic security technologies to fortify their homes against the threat of a home intrusion. In this article, I focus on the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), a widely used electronic security system in Kingston. Attuned to threats through the mobilization of haptic, kinaesthetic, and thermoceptive capabilities, the IDS presents an alternate vision of urban security—that is, one not tethered to the primacy of the electronic gaze. In considering the discourse of electronic security providers and middle‐class residents who live in gated enclosures, I interrogate the IDS as an extra‐sensory sentinel assemblage and as a critical urban actor. Doing so reveals, I argue, how the IDS is changing how the risk/crime of a home intrusion is being temporally, spatially, and relationally anticipated and experienced both within and beyond the fortified domestic sphere. This article highlights the importance of integrating non‐human and non‐visual sensorialities into discussions of security in high‐crime urban contexts.