Copwatching and the First Amendment

I have been conducting research related to bystander recording of the police (“copwatching”) and the First Amendment right to record police in public, since 2013. This page provides organized access to the results of that line of research (updated Nov. 2024).

Academic publications

Books

Cover of "Police Visibility" (book) “Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras” (University of California Press, June 2021) [link].

  • Awarded the 2022 Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) Book Prize for outstanding monograph on surveillance published in 2021.
  • Read reviews by Skinner-Thompson (JOTWELL), Miranda (Information Polity), Tabor (Surveillance & Society), and Bohigian (Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books).

Articles and chapters

Newell, Bryce Clayton. 2019. “Context, Visibility, and Control: Police Work and the Contested Objectivity of Bystander Video.” New Media & Society 21 (1): 60–76. [link]

Newell, Bryce Clayton. 2014. “Technopolicing, Surveillance, and Citizen Oversight: A Neorepublican Theory of Liberty and Information Control.” Government Information Quarterly 31 (3): 421–431. [link]

Newell, Bryce Clayton. 2014. “Crossing Lenses: Policing’s New Visibility and the Role of ‘Smartphone Journalism’ as a Form of Freedom-Preserving Reciprocal Surveillance.” Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 2014 (1): 59–104. [PDF]

Newell, Bryce Clayton, “Context, Visibility, and Control: Contesting the Objectivity of Visual (Video) Records of Police-Citizen Interactions.” In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2017) 54 (1): 766–767 (2017).

Newell, Bryce Clayton. 2015. “Transparent Lives and the Surveillance State: Policing, New Visibility, and Information Policy.” Doctoral thesis. University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

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