Municipal corporate security and the intensification of urban surveillance

Abstract

This article explores the surveillance work of municipal corporate security (MCS) units in Canadian cities. Drawing on analysis of freedom of information requests, we document the introduction of new and modified surveillance technologies through MCS. These units engage in surveillance of City employees and citizens on municipal lands and in municipal buildings. Although some technologies deployed by MCS (such as electronic access cards and badges) appear mundane, we demonstrate how MCS units are repurposing, enhancing, and recombining these technologies with existing forms in ways that have been described as the intensification of surveillance. While recent attention in the surveillance studies and urban studies literatures has been rightfully placed on private auspices and provision of externally directed urban surveillance, our analysis of MCS activities suggests that scholars should continue to focus on public auspices and provision of security and internally directed surveillance too. What defines the intensification of urban surveillance therefore may be less a privatized and technologically advanced character and more a resolute comfort with a constantly mutating amalgam of public/private, human/technological, and external/internal forms and foci. © The author(s).