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A bank of photographers waiting for a perp walk about 100 feet away. ©Mary Angela Bock Figure 2 Waiting for Jerry Sandusky to arrive. ©Mary Angela Bock
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This qualitative project examines an American photojournalism ritual known as the “perp walk,” defined as the nonconsensual imaging of a person who is either in custody or otherwise legally obligated to attend a legal proceeding. The project draws from interviews, participant observation, and visual textual analysis to analyze perp walks within a c...
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The adoption of digital technologies, along with current economic realities, has affected the entire process of visual news production. It has also influenced the traditional concept of photojournalism. As a result, news photographers face multiple new challenges. Although visual news material is becoming ever more important, news organizations hav...
Citations
... The so-called 'perp walk' is a media ritual where the criminal justice system mobilises the press to make a suspect publicly visible, for example when taking them into a police station. The perp walk is a longstanding intersection of criminal justice and media spectacle (Bock, 2015). Yet these partnerships have also shifted from the public to the private sector with the advent of crime-fighting websites that label those with criminal records (Lageson & Maruna, 2018). ...
... Police are tested within secured spaces, their professionalization is largely private, though they are promoted in highly publicized events. Suspects are taped in their interrogations, watched in jails with security cameras, and only rarely viewed by public cameras in the occasional "major" trial (Bock 2015;Chance 1995;Kessler 2013). ...
The dramatic proliferation of smart phones worldwide has fostered the growth of video activism as a check on government authority. Cop-watching, as it is known colloquially, is one such response in the U.S., where citizens are killed by police more often than in other democratic countries. Based on ethnographic and qualitative text analysis, this project examines the way video evidence has changed the discursive landscape for police officers, who are faced with an existential impetus to regain authority. The analysis suggests that a war-like metaphor fuels a broad range of official and unofficial responses, whether in high-brow public relations tactics or street-level violence. The grounded evidence from this project suggests that smart phone video influences not only news coverage about individual instances of violence but also societal discourses about police authority.
By examining the images that Undocuqueer activists circulate in online spaces, this study explores how activists rely on visual expression to reveal and reframe the complex forces that shape Undocuqueer life in the United States. Undocuqueer visual communications expose (1) the in-betweenness that defines the Undocuqueer experience, (2) the expanding transnational intersectional coalitions at the foundation of the movement, and (3) a reconceptualization of Undocuqueer worth that is independent from the economic contributions of the community. These countervisualities reclaim what Mirzoeff called the community's right to look and demonstrate alternative forms of self and community that could be more conducive to social transformation and justice.
This paper analyzes a practice of presenting suspects, which is a ritual that displays a suspect before the media. A practice used on suspects in high profile cases. Until now, although it is frequently used there has been no attempt to examine such practices in Indonesia. In the criminal procedure scholarship, there is no standard term to describe it. This article will refer to such ritual as a presentation of suspects. This ritual has also been practiced around the world with different methods and has a long history, especially in the United States. This article discusses the presentation of suspects and question whether such a ritual is a violation of the fundamental rights of being presumed innocent until found guilty. Two issues will be examined to answer this question: The purported objectives for the practice and the accused’s right to be presumed innocent. The term innocence here is a presumptively innocent and not factually innocent. With that in mind, to some degree, this article realizes it would be permissible to deprive their liberty if it has a higher purpose. In the end, this article argues that the practice of presenting suspects, at least in the crime of consensual gay sex and prostitution, is a violation of the principle. The harm caused by such offenses is not strong enough to justify the ritual. As a result, it undoubtedly imposes pre-conviction punishment of degrading the accused, especially in this era of unlimited distribution of information. It provides a room for online judges to hold a trial in social media. The punishment imposed by society could cause more harm than the official punishment itself. In the end, this article also proposes a more detailed regulation to limit the use of presentation based on the seriousness level of the crimes.
