The Benevolent Intruder: Domescity and Television-as-Policing
In
“Crime Prevention Tips: Preventing Residential Burglaries” a document
circulated by the Dallas police in 2011, there were a series of tips for residents
to safeguard themselves from random acts of burglary. The most striking element
in this document was the uncanny reference to television’s spatial and sonic significance.
The document foregrounded the television’s ability to convey a “lived in look”
by metonymically standing in for the inhabited house itself. For instance,
residents were advised to recreate the sense of habitation by leaving their
television sets on at a conversational volume level, if they happen to be away from
home for an extended period of time.”[1]
The imbrication of law enforcement and televisual space was nothing new to the
Dallas police who had already dabbled with television earlier. For instance
their reality documentary series Police
Women of Dallas (2010), featured five Dallas police women whose lives were telecast
in TLC in an attempt to render a positive image of the police and to boost
recruitment. Attorney Bob Gorsky, who represents Dallas Police Association
members, describes the show thus:
“You may be caught on
camera in something that you have no control over that you want back […] You
have to be on your best behavior. Don't play for the cameras; do police work.”[2]
Therefore,
the inference of television as a preventive tool for burglary seemed to be the
next step in extending the supervisory function of television. This exemplifies
the ways in which television has become imbricated in discourses about security
and safety. As early as the 1980s, there were television sets that were
patented with specifications that could control its display or respond in a
pre-selection fashion when the viewer went too close to the screen.[3]
This was designed so as to protect the viewers’ eyesight from the harsh glare
of the television screen.
With
technological improvisations, devices that can mobilze the affective power of
televisual images have also emerged. For instance “fake television” are now
available in the market; these are aimed at functioning as burglar deterrents. The
fake TV simulates the HDTV effect through the use of a super bright LED that generates
different shades of color, as well as fades and scene changes. This is supposed
to give a semblance of people inhabiting
the space of home. What is interesting about this instance, especially when
read in connection to the Dallas police advisory earlier, is the way Fake TV
reworks the notion of habitation. If earlier, it was the presence of the
viewers that calibrated the functioning of television within the confines of
the domestic space, the fake TV can produce the semblance of the viewership
through its manipulation of light.
The
logic with which fake TV functions is mediated via the imagination of habitual
modes of interaction and the binaries of public and private that seep into the discussions
on security concerns. The presence of television is seen as an enactment of the
displacement of the public to the indoors. In some cases, such as the one that
regulates proximity to the actual television set, or the use of child-lock
features, the television itself begins to exemplify a sort of a preventive
disciplinary regime. In case of the Dallas police advisory and the example of
the fake television, the narrative of paranoia that is built around the
incursion of an outside threat into the domestic interior, makes the television
a veritable policing tool. Anna McCarthy’s idea of television’s repetitive
thrust and the culture of waiting that television entails perhaps allows us
another way of reconceptualizing this. For McCarthy television becomes an
integral part of the regulation of time and space in public spaces. The recent
uptake of the television’s “policing” function perhaps allows us to push this
idea of the regulation of time and space into the space of the domestic interior
as well. For instance, consider
this product description of Fake TV (FTV -10 Burglar Deterrent) which goes:
“Most burglars will not break into an occupied
house. Why risk prison? So when a prowler sees that flickering glow that means
someone is home watching TV, he knows to move on to an easier target. When you
are away, FakeTV says "alive" far more than a lamp on a timer ever
could. Buy a FakeTV and make your home an unappealing choice for a break-in[4].
An
underlying rhetoric of policing and public space seems to imbue this
description as well as the Dallas police advisory. It would perhaps not be too
far-fetched to say then, that the television in some ways, erases the
public-private boundary, not necessarily by deterring the burgler, but by
inviting the grammar of policing and security—a very public grammar, into the
space of the home.
[1] http://www.dallaspolice.net/content/11/66/uploads/ResidentialBurglariesPreventionTips.pdf
[2] http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/dallas/headlines/20101027-TV-s-Dallas-police-fixation-turns-874.ece
[3] Chi C, Ho et al.‘Television
set with supervising function of alarming burglary and safe watching distance’,
United States Patent, March 23, 1982.
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