Compliance, innocence, resistance: Bodyworn cameras and discourses of mediated policing on YouTube

The use of bodyworn cameras (BWCs) by police has intensified in the last decade. Commonsense understandings of BWCs see them as objectifying relations with the public such that the behavior of both police and citizens is mitigated. Research on their use, however, has netted varying results, ranging from reductions in police and public misconduct, to no change at all. While the availability of police BWC footage on YouTube appears to provide public accountability, it does little to combat the racializing power of police, and does much to engorge violent regimes of visibility. This article examines discourses used in YouTube comments on BWC videos of wrongful arrests. To enact its analysis, it uses a tripartite conceptual framework drawing from Beutin’s notion of racialization as a way of seeing, McKay and Lee’s contention that BWCs are truth-telling technologies, and insights from Meek’s and Weheliye’s work on biopolitical media. The analysis reveals the differing conditions under which racialized subjects are granted empathy in BWC videos, how gender can work as a mechanism for mobilizing discourses of compliance, and how discourses of innocence affect these elements. In turn, it problematizes BWCs and the footage they produce, thereby providing a critique of racialized police practices on YouTube.