With support from University Seminars
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this faculty workshop has been postponed.
Join us for a faculty presentation of a work-in-progress with Professor Julie Stone Peters.
In April 2015, an article appeared in the Atlantic titled, “‘Thank God for Cellphone Video Cameras’: The Vast Technological Change Which Has Helped Make a Movement Possible.” We were seeing police violence as never before, caught by improved smartphone cameras and bodycam footage. The camera promised a different future. Forced to “adjust to a world caught on tape,” the police would have to change. As the ACLU declared, “video technology” was on the brink of producing “a full-fledged revolution in policing.”
In this talk Professor Peters will present her book-in-progress, which tells the stories of people caught in the crossfire of the camera wars. The book will recount how—in this world of newly ubiquitous recording—police, prosecutors, and a massive political machinery sought to neutralize what the camera showed. It’s the story of how officials sanitized images of violence, learned to finesse the rhetoric of reports and briefings, built evidentiary routines that fragmented, delayed, and recontextualized footage. And it’s the story of people who watched as police attorneys lied, bystanders whose cameras were destroyed, civil rights litigants whose videos were turned against them, family members who begged for bodycam footage showing a police killing but were turned away. It’s the story of how—in the most thoroughly documented era of state violence in American history—our cameras backfired.
In addition to discussing the project itself, Professor Peters will talk about the challenges of translating academic scholarship into writing for general audiences.
Professor Peters talk will be followed by a response from Peter Moskos, a Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration and the CUNY Graduate Center in the Department of Sociology.
Please RSVP to comparativemedia@columbia.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings (and to receive access to campus, for non-Columbia affiliates).
Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and an affiliated Professor at Columbia Law School. She works at the intersection of law and humanities and media history, exploring performance, film, digital, and legal cultures from antiquity to the present. She is the author (most recently) of Law as Performance (2022) and Staging Witchcraft Before the Law (2024). She is Co-Editor of the Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities book series, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Humboldt Foundation fellowships, was most recently a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law, and teaches regularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. In addition to publishing academically, her writing has appeared in Slate, the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Times, Village Voice, Public Books, and elsewhere.
Peter Moskos teaches in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Moskos, a Princeton and Harvard trained sociologist, is a former Baltimore City Police Officer, director of John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project, and the official historian of New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection Police.
Moskos is Director of John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, is a faculty member in CUNY’s Doctoral Program in Sociology, has taught introductory criminal justice classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, and was a visiting scholar at the National Policing College, Bramshill, England.
Moskos, a former Baltimore City police officer, studies people the old-fashioned way: He talks to them. Moskos’s four books - Back from the Brink, Cop in the Hood, In Defense of Flogging, and Greek Americans — have won high praise and earned him recognition as one of Atlantic Magazine’s “Brave Thinkers” of the year. He has also published in the Washington Post, Washington Monthly, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Daily News, New York Post, Macleans, Vital City, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and his “Quality Policing” podcast and blog.
His fourth book, Back from the Brink: Inside NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop (Oxford University Press) in an account of the policing, Compstat, and New York City's great 1990's crime drop.