Targeted

Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy

Kelly Gates

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Hardback

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English

New York University Press
19 August 2025

Media studies; Police & security services; Criminal investigation & detection; Data capture & analysis

Series: Critical Cultural Communication

How video transformed policing and security

Video cameras are everywhere: attached to buildings, drones, and dashboards; embedded in smartphones, laptops, and doorbells; worn on police uniforms and sunglasses. In Targeted, Kelly Gates argues that the resulting avalanche of video has transformed the landscape of policing and security in the twenty-first century. Video production, analysis, and archival management are now central to the ways police power is exercised, criminal law enforced, and spaces of human habitation securitized.

Gates examines the primacy of video in four key areas of policing and security: the field of digital multimedia forensics, private video surveillance infrastructure development, police body-worn camera systems, and video analytics for automated surveillance (Video AI). Case studies of two companies illustrate the role of corporations in these far-reaching media-technological changes. Target Corporation has integrated its retail security operations with law enforcement, expanding its surveillance beyond its stores and parking lots and into the criminal legal system. Axon Enterprise is leveraging the growing volume of police body-cam video to build a large-scale proprietary platform for policing.

Targeted reveals the role of video infrastructure development in the increasingly entangled relationship between the modern police and the modern corporation, in the long wake and ruins of neoliberalism.

By: Kelly Gates
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 426g
ISBN: 9781479829194
ISBN 10: 1479829196
Series: Critical Cultural Communication
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 19 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Kelly Gates is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, as well as the editor of International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 6: Media Studies Futures and The New Media of Surveillance. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Surveillance & Society, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Social Semiotics.

Reviews for Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy

""In this provocative, lucidly-written book, Kelly Gates uncovers the systems that sort and analyze the 'avalanches of video' captured by surveillance and policing cameras. Tackling topics like video forensics, policy body-cams, and video AI, Targeted does us all a huge service by detailing the media logistics and privatization of policing that surface around every corner. A must-read in these tumultuous times."" - Lisa Parks, University of California at Santa Barbara ""A deeply researched exposé of the video surveillance industry. Kelly Gates shows how visibility is much more than a trap: it is a system of control that weaves together public and private institutions in an increasingly automated surveillance society. Targeted is a tour de force that continues Gates's pioneering work on visual surveillance. It is an invaluable contribution to literature on surveillance and an essential road map for navigating the ongoing privatization and commercialization of the security state."" - Mark Andrejevic, Monash University