The “All-Seeing Community”: Charleston’s Eastside, Video Surveillance, and the Listening Task

Abstract

On Charleston’s Eastside, the belief in video surveillance as a tool to “deter crime” was widely shared by the local church community, law enforcement, and social media groups, after a significant increase in gun violence in 2019. By concentrating on the public discourses surrounding the concomitantly rapid increase in gun violence and video surveillance, this paper analyzes the ways in which these communications—through their language, images, and filmic documentation—have shaped and informed public perceptions of CCTV in Charleston’s Eastside. The presented discourses around the public perception of video surveillance and the analysis thereof offer an opportunity to explore the cultural assumptions as well as the underlying racial, gender-based, and socio-economic power dynamics experienced in Charleston’s Eastside community. Through the analysis’s broad scope, this paper argues for a shift in public perceptions of video surveillance. As an integral part of the Eastside’s surveillance infrastructure, video surveillance in the hands of a community of “all-seers” displays, at first, unspoken strategies for preserving racialized surveillance hierarchies that are deeply embedded in the history of Charleston. However, through the counternarratives presented in Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s documentary America Street (2019), those power dynamics are ultimately diffused and questioned, resulting in a reevaluation of video surveillance through the lens of social justice movements, whose effects extend beyond Charleston’s city borders.