Surveillance in the Capital of Culture

By Dr Roy Coleman

As surveillance cameras routinely monitor the street prohibitions of the neoliberal city, they also reinforce the moral codes, intolerances and normative prescriptions of its creators. Paradoxical as it may seem, for all the talk of cultural celebration and putting ‘culture’ at the centre of current urban renaissance drives, certain forms of culture are increasingly being subject to oppressive monitoring and curtailment. Recently lauded with the title of European Capital of Culture for 2008, Liverpool city council passed a byelaw to curtail a range of grassroots and spontaneous street activities and protests. The broadness of the byelaw means it can be used attack a range of perceived ‘nuisances’ that are tied to the secondary economy in the city and that, for the new primary definers who articulate Liverpool’s renaissance, give the city the image of a ‘bargain basement economy’.1 The byelaw makes it an offence for people to sell or tout for business in the streets or other public places, including flower sellers to sell in restaurants and bars. The new law also bans individuals asking for money to ‘mind’ cars and prevents charities stopping people in the street.

As a key tool in the politics of vision, cameras in the cities of the UK are helping to put into effect what can and cannot be seen on the streets. As cameras aid the strategic balance between aesthetics and function, any notion of the city as a space of cultural expression for younger people continues to be highly circumscribed. In Liverpool, skateboarders can be fined from between £250 to a £1000 if they break a bylaw banning skating passed by city councilors in July 2002. Liverpool council claimed that skateboarding should be an offense as it is giving the city a bad image in terms of scaring off tourists and shoppers, as well as damaging statues and memorials.

In another development, cities in the counties of Essex, Hampshire, Cornwall and Devon police and private security enforce a policy that has banned the wearing of hooded tops, baseball caps and hats of various descriptions. For all the techno-hype, cameras cannot identify people accurately if they are wearing headgear. This measure is clearly targeted at young people who are stopped and told to remove headgear if they want to remain in the city centre. As one businesswoman stated “it’s a brilliant idea [but] some kids get stroppy when we ask them to remove their hoods. As long as it helps in the fight against crime it isn’t discriminating against young people” (The Independent, 23 May, 2003). As well as infringing upon the cultural expression of the young, such measures will further criminalize a generation and reinforce stereotypical discourses around ‘dangerous youth’ in the public mind.2

As some writers have demonstrated, CCTV disproportionately surveys and casts suspicion on the poor in the spaces of the city centres (Norris and Armstrong, 1999) and in the estates outside of the city (Malik, 1995). The construction of ‘the theme park city’ only reinforces these processes, so that those walking the streets who are teenagers, dressed inappropriately and without branded shopping bags (low income categories) are likely targets of security personnel whose ‘nose’ for suspicion has been directed at those who appear to be ‘walking or standing without due cause’. Public and private police are working together in hybrid organisations. Despite organisational differences public and private policing agencies have found common ground in constructing and sharing a ‘common sense’ morality of public space. The re-moralisation of the streets harks back to fears of the rise of a Dickensian cityscape that threatens to squander the careful construction of a ‘responsible’ vision for centre space. Researchers have shown that those agencies authorised to police city centres characterise the objects of their powerful gaze as ‘dross’, ‘scallies’, ‘knobs’, ‘hawkers’, ‘urchins’ and ‘fake homeless’. These pathological constructions of the less palatable aspects of modern city life complement and reinforce, albeit in less sophisticated tones, the broader visions for order in the city that emanate from the primary definers of neoliberal rule.

In the neoliberal city the normative demarcation of space strongly targets the homeless who have been successfully defined (along with other poor people) as just “so many ‘broken windows’”, the idea being “not to repair them but to remove them altogether” (Mitchell, 2001: 83). The confrontation with the homeless has been particularly unforgiving in many cities of the ‘advanced’ capitalist world. In Liverpool, sellers of the Big Issue magazine have been banned from the main indoor shopping mall and the stores of the larger retailers, and have been subject to a “curfew” on sales after 8pm in specified areas of the city (Daily Post, 11 May, 2002). As part of a larger campaign against the homeless, this embargo restricts freedom of movement around the city and may result in curtailing access to food, drink, shelter and facilities for cleanliness to homeless people in the city. ‘Operation Change’ launched in Liverpool in 2003 aimed to reduce ‘anti-social behavior’ among beggars and, in the words of a Chamber of Commerce spokesperson, target “people who allegedly can’t speak English, using their children to ask for money” (Daily Post, March 13 2003). Publicity posters were used (titled: “Fact: Nobody needs to beg for a bed”) showing a picture of a homeless person, crouched on a city street, whose face is covered by a cardboard sign that reads, “Help them make the change, keep your change”. A process of silencing the experiences of homeless people and irresponsibilizing their presence in the city is reflected in the poster campaigns, which discourage local people from talking to and handing over loose change to street people. In Liverpool, this has been coupled with undercover policing and targeted surveillance resulting in the arrest, caution or charging of several hundred in 2002 in relation to begging offences. As begging is now an arrest able offence, all beggars are now routinely finger-printed and placed on the Police National Computer (Ibid). Oppressive monitoring of the homeless is leading to outright removal as court injunctions are set to lead the way to a national ban on begging (The Independent, 22 August, 2003). In an unprecedented move in October 2003 all 130 Big Issue Vendors were banned from selling in downtown Liverpool after 200 police swamped the city centre and arrested 57 people on suspicion of drug offences, 30 of whom were sellers of the homeless magazine and only 12 were actually charged). The City Centre Manager heralded the move as a “major step forward in creating a cleaner, safer and more attractive environment” (The Guardian, 18 October, 2003). After threats of legal action by the homeless magazine ‘the ban’ was lifted after one week but had served its purpose in sending out a message of censure towards homeless people regarding ‘their place’ within a cleansed city.

The ‘hindrances’ and ‘nuisances’ to neoliberal progress are not always related to simple illegalities associated with crime. These ‘nuisances’ appear to infringe on the ‘quality of life’ for the relatively affluent groups of shoppers and tourists and can be seen as a feature of city life across national borders. What this indicates however, is a role for policing and surveillance which not only provide a means of ‘social sorting’ (Lyon, 2003), but that relates to a wider process of social removal, a removal that attempts to render ‘invisible’ unequal relations both on the streets and in public and political debate. As in the 19th century capitalist city, the process of ‘moving them on’ (Brogden, 1982) and defending lines of social demarcation survives as a mechanism for dealing with inequality. CCTV ensures an increasingly codified set of unequal rights regarding the use of space and, in displacing inequality, reinforces the development of a hidden city. Just as the broader politics of image dictate that main routes into cities are receiving makeovers to disguise the poor estates that lie on either side from visitors (mass tree planting on man-made hills) and renaming (from Street to Boulevard) – so CCTV can be understood as an attempt to disguise-through-exclusion the negative side of neoliberal city building.

1: The need of local people for lower-end priced products and so-called ‘bargain shopping’ is borne out by the fact that Liverpool was ranked the poorest area in the UK in terms of average incomes with a high proportion of families surviving on around £8,000 a year (Liverpool Echo, 25 October, 1999). This reality of the working class city has been hard to re-image for local marketers.

2: In Liverpool, questioning the legitimacy of young people to be on the streets has been filtered through a number of schemes. The latest initiative, straight from New York, is what is known in the local press as the “yob tank”. This police mobile prison tours the city locking up ‘anti-social youths’, fully kitted with internal and external CCTV and costing £20,000 (Liverpool Echo, 21 January, 2003).