With the largest number of CCTV cameras in Europe turned on them, there is no doubt that people in Britain are being watched. There is an entire unit (the Forward Intelligence Team, or ‘FIT’) devoted to the task of surveillance of protests. Protests are also where sousveillance has gained notoriety and is most coordinated, with the protest group FIT-watch dedicated to filming FIT, and disrupting filming by it (see Red Pepper, Oct/Nov 2008).

The case of the G20 protests, and in particular Ian Tomlinson’s death, illustrates the effectiveness of sousveillance. Footage from protesters directly led to the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigating the possibility of assault, a HM Inspectorate of Constabulary review of public order policing and the Home Office committee review of G20 policing.

Sousveillance has become more achievable. With the array of advanced and affordable technology available, you can use a camera powerful enough to record details like police ID numbers at a safe distance; you can live blog your experiences, enabling a compelling, coherent account of events to accumulate instantly; and perhaps most potent of all, you can video events unfolding on your phone. Once you have your photos and your footage, you can quickly and cheaply upload the content to the internet on high speed connections, while sites such as YouTube and Flickr will host the content and make it freely and widely available.

Sousveillance can be a form of protest in itself. Red Pepper’s ‘Take a Photo of a Police Officer Day’ (5 February) was called in response to the criminalisation of photographing police officers. Amateur and professional photographers across the country started taking photos of the police and putting them up on Facebook and across the blogosphere.

The increasing use of the term signals both a degree of shift in power towards citizens and an increased taking up of power already available. Its use at the G20 protests also demonstrates a much greater awareness of the need to ‘keep an eye’ on the police and has brought sousveillance into the spotlight.

The politics of the police

At the Convention on Modern Liberty in February, Harriet Sergeant reminded us that: ‘Unlike many other police forces, British police were not intended to be servants of the state, but servants of the communities that they serve. Their powers are personal, used at their own discretion and derived from the crown. This essential feature of British policing – policing by consent, which guarantees our individual liberty – is now in jeopardy.’

So if British policing is intrinsically a relationship between the citizen or community and the individual police officer or police force, and ‘the public are the police’, when the police are unaccountable and used by the state to control us, it becomes our duty as citizens to police them.

Sousveillance is not ideal. It is much better to have an accountable police force that is independently regulated. I hope sousveillance will be a useful tool, not the last stand against an unruly police force. As the police learn the power of sousveillance, their tactics could change. But will they become more accountable as a result, or will they change the rules to save changing their behaviour?

Despite its recent popularity, some people are already looking beyond the term ‘sousveillance’ (with the broader meaning of recording from the first person perspective) to the higher order ‘equiveillance’ – a state of equilibrium between sousveillance and surveillance. But would this be a benign balance or a suspicious stand off?

Along with the term comes the idea that sousveillance reduces the need for surveillance. For example, citizens may solve crimes or disputes collectively. This could be seen as a high-tech regression to a village-level form of scrutiny or supervision. However, could we not be playing into the hands of the surveillance-obsessed state in internalising the suspicion and snooping already inherent to some extent in our society?

Limitations

Sousveillance as inverse surveillance by definition must be from below, and so will always rely on a ‘boost’ from those with power and a platform to make an impact. For example, footage of brutality at the G20 protests surfaced on YouTube initially, before the Guardian ran with the story – which marked the turn in public opinion. Sousveillance can only be effective in a country where the media is free enough to air videos that challenge the official account of events.

More fundamentally, as ‘the watched’ we remain subject to ‘the watchers’, and they remain able to impose limitations on us. This is particularly pertinent in the context of watching the police.

Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 makes it illegal to photograph a policeman, when the photograph ‘is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. The misconception that the law applies to any policeman anywhere is so widespread among the police and the public, and changes their behaviours to such a marked extent, that it has almost the same effect as if it actually were the law.

For instance, Justin Tallis, a freelance photographer, on photographing a member of the FIT at a Gaza protest against the BBC, was told, ‘You’re not allowed to take photos of police officers’ and nearly had his camera confiscated forcibly. The officer’s misunderstanding of the law becomes even more incredulous when you know that this incident happened 21 days before the Act became law. This demonstrates just how vulnerable sousveillance is to legislation or misinformation about the law.’

For sousveillance to have the power needed to prevent the police from committing illegal or immoral acts, as opposed to holding them to account when they do, it must be backed up by the judicial system, the political system and a regulatory body concerned with the police. The police force and the IPCC need to take all complaints seriously and show they are prepared to prosecute where appropriate. Disciplinary action against police officers needs to be a genuine disincentive. Footage as a result of sousveillance also needs to be respected by the IPCC – I wonder if they would be giving as much weight to footage from Ian Tomlinson’s death if the public pressure were less. Sousveillance has a place in achieving a regulated police force but is not enough on its own.

n Clare Coatman was one of the organisers of the Convention on Modern Liberty, and works for Open Democracy