‘America,This is Your Ride Along’: High-Tech Policing,Transparency,and the Televisuality of Race

Abstract

This article takes the Reelz show On Patrol: Live (OPL) as a case study for theorizing race, media technologies, police violence, and the discourse of transparency. I argue that OPL engages with two meanings of transparency that are in tension: (1) transparency as instruction and interpretation, wherein the viewer needs to be led by experts; (2) transparency as visual and translucent, especially when pertaining to race and racial violence. Both meanings are bound up with technological optimism and a belief in the objectivity of media technologies. The second sense reveals the show’s racial epistemology, one that suggests that race and racial discrimination are easily knowable through the visual and thus do not require interpretation or discussion. By commenting only on the technicalities of policing and the law and leaving unstated the racial dynamics of each interaction, the show separates race and policing, despite U.S. policing’s origins in chattel slavery.