Preempting Dissent: Tasers, Secrecy and Open Source Media Production.

The SIUC Global Media Research Center presents Dr. Andrew Opel, Florida State University, "Preempting Dissent: Tasers, Secrecy and Open Source Media Production".

Andrew Opel:
Preemption, Tasering, Protests, and Policing the Police

by Jennifer "Jay" Bull

Andrew Opel, author of Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future and professor in the Department of Communication at Florida State University, will speak as part of the Global Media Research Project on Monday, February 1 at 4:30 p.m. in the Communications Building's room 1032.

His lecture, Tasers, Secrecy, and Open-source Media Production, will deal with preemptive law-enforcement tactics and technologies and the use of civil disobedience as a tool of protest, starting with the Trade Agreement of the Americas treaty negotiations in 2003 in Miami.

Before the FTAA meetings, critics railed against the secrecy surrounding a World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 in Seattle.

"The negotiations and agreements were taking place behind closed doors, so civil society was denied a seat at the table, civil society being a range of groups from trade unions to environmental groups to human-rights activists," Opel told Nightlife. "A range of nongovernmental organizations were seeking to be a part of the negotiation process and help craft the language of these trade agreements. Clearly, there is no free trade-- all market transactions are regulated, and the thought of civil society was, 'Who gets to set the rules of global trade and who wins and who loses by those rules?' If civil society is shut out of the negotiation process, then their concerns are left to protest in the street in a media campaign rather than an actual policy discussion."

After the Seattle protests erupted in mass violence, primarily against property, the Miami police decided to crack down before the FTAA protests even started, Opel said, calling it a policy of "act first, apologize later."

The Miami police preemptively-- and, according to Opel, illegally-- arrested suspected troublemakers and jailed them for the duration of the FTAA negotiations, including National Lawyers Guild attorneys who came to protect the legal rights of protesters then released many of them without charges.

"The city of Miami issued an extensive apology after their full investigation of what went on at the FTAA protesting and the human-rights violations that took place," Opel said. "So it was acknowledged after the fact, so this was part of the pattern. Part of the logic of preemption is to act, act first, and do the analysis or deal with the repercussions afterwards. It's a logic that goes against deliberative democracy and it tries to literally preempt the deliberation process, preempt democratic debate and discussion. Oftentimes, it's framed in a need to act, 'We must act now.' Clearly it was used in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from using these weapons which did not exist. The call to action supersedes any time or space for deliberative discussion on the merits of the actions or the course of the actions."

Legally questionable preemption is not only tactical, but technological, Opel said, citing the use of shock weapons like Tasers and paintballs filled with pepper spray. "They are now using a sound device to disperse large crowds as well as a heating microwave device that makes your skin feel like it's burning," Opel said.

Supposedly nonlethal, many of these technologies have caused fatalities, Opel said, and the harm they cause is largely unseen.

"They have a militarizing function, but one of the important ways that they are changing our public space is that they are creating a climate where to participate in nonviolent civil disobedience then opens yourself up to the possibility of being tasered," Opel said. "Tasering and these other less-lethal technologies change what has been a long relationship of policing to civil disobedience....

"We know that civil disobedience has played a pretty critical role in the history of the twentieth century, from the suffragettes on to the civil-rights movement," Opel added. "People putting their bodies together in the streets has played a significant role in changing our political and social norms and had a big influence [in gaining rights and changing societies]. The police response to those historically has been a very modernist response in that the technologies are very visible and they are understood by the general public. The images of releasing the dogs and fire hoses on the public were circulated nationally and internationally. There was a great public outrage, because people understood what it meant to be sprayed by a fire hose or be bitten by a dog or beaten with a billyclub, so it created a representation of the violence that was central to the propagation of the protesters' message.... [T]hose violent [police] reactions then served to advance the cause of the movement because it showed that there couldn't be a rational acceptance of the ideas and instead they were resorting to violence instead of a more civil discussion of the redress of grievances, if you will." vspace=5>

However, with Tasers, microwave weapons, and preemptive arrests, Opel contended that the violence perpetrated against nonviolent protesters is no longer visible. Tasers, unlike dogs or billyclubs, don't leave scars or other discernible wounds. "It's not something that elicits the same sort of reaction that the previous policing technologies elicited, so it's interrupting the image cycle and the representation process, the representation of police violence," Opel said. "It doesn't convey a sense of violence in the way that police violence has been historically represented."

Tasers cause another concern, Opel said: "It's serving to domesticate torture. It is getting people used to the idea that it is acceptable to shock people who are not complying. What we've seen is an unregulated, accelerating use of these technologies to achieve compliance. The majority of Taser applications are on unarmed civilian citizens, and increasingly, if you do a simple YouTube search of Taser videos, they are being used by police instead of dialogue, instead of conversation and discussion, and the police maybe talking somebody down....

"[T]he historical relationship between the public and police involve dialogue, and that dialogue is being interrupted by the Taser," Opel said. "The Taser has short-circuited the relationship between police and citizens. In many cases, people have been tasered in police custody. They are in handcuffs and are being tasered in police cars. We've had eleven-year-old schoolchildren tasered, we've had grandmothers tasered, we have had people in wheelchairs tasered. We had a man on a bicycle tasered near Pensacola, Florida, and he was tasered while the police officer was in his car driving--  he shot the Taser out the window, the man fell off the bike, and then [the police officer] ran over him with his police car and killed him. There's all these instances, and they seem to be proliferating."

However, as is often the case with technological problems, citizens have found technological solutions-- handheld cameras.

"The accountability that is happening is happening through citizen-generated media, so again it is back to the power of representation and the struggle over imagery," Opel said. "You've got all these images that are circulated on overreaching by the police, police inappropriately using the Taser. There was a case in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski, flew into Vancouver. His mother was waiting for him, they detained him, he became agitated, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police ended up tasering him because he was agitated.

"[Police] claim that they only tasered him two or three times, but the citizen-generated video of the incident showed that they tasered him six times, and he proceeded to die," Opel continued. "As a result [of the tasering], he went into cardiac arrest. So that citizen-generated media has become critical in court cases now, and is a way that the struggle over accountability is taking place in the level of representation."

Opel is currently working on an open-source documentary film to address many of these issues at <http://OpenSourceCinema.org>.

"People can donate their video to the project and they can also use our video because we recognize that we are in what Wired magazine calls a 'rip, mix, burn' culture," Opel said. "We want to allow people to have access to our raw materials and not just have us be the gatekeepers and not come up with just one statement of what that means, but provide the raw materials for people to pick up and reconfigure and make media products about what they think it means.

"The research project then is to both explore the possibilities and limitations of an open-source documentary, to explore the possibility of sharing a visual media online," Opel concluded. "What are the technical barriers? What are the social learning curves that are taking place around this kind of a process? What kind of products do people end up coming up with? What do they donate? We finished the first year of a three-year grant. We are in the middle of trying to see what we can contribute and put out there in the form of a project, and what other people then do with the materials that we aggregate and make available."