This article examines the contemporary belief that recording police violence promotes accountability, situating it in the long liberal tradition that treats transparency as a democratic good. Drawing on political theory, media studies, and research on police accountability activism, it shows how widespread civilian participation in surveillance persists despite clear evidence that visibility rarely produces accountability or reform, revealing transparency as a resilient political faith rather than an effective mechanism of change.

This article analyzes competing claims about policing’s “new visibility,” showing that while both police accountability activists and police institutions frame on-officer cameras as tools of accountability grounded in mechanical objectivity, these systems ultimately function as counter-sousveillance technologies that privilege police perspectives and neutralize third-party documentation.

This article examines how race and policing are mutually constitutive, showing how police practices not only enforce racial order but actively produce racial categories and meanings. By analyzing the racialization of police work and the policing of race as a social process, the article situates racial reproduction as central to policing’s mandate, extending and updating Neocleous’s account of police power as the production of social order.

This article argues that U.S. policing is best understood as a central institution of white democracy: a project that produces social order by maintaining the color line through the administration of poverty and the recognition and denial of citizenship on the basis of race. It traces policing’s roots in slave patrols and fugitive-slave enforcement, then explains the persistence of racist outcomes in the officially color-blind era through the discretionary power of officers as “petty sovereigns.”