Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil

Abstract

Drawing on public–private circuits for urban surveillance in Recife, Brazil, this article unpacks how camera operators and ordinary residents are sensorially attuned to what constitutes a threat to urban order, from the perspective of state security governance. Through the notion of sensory enskilment, the piece delves into how surveillant civilians learn to distinguish such threats in digitally mediated urban sightings. By attending to the development of scopic skills in everyday surveillance contexts, I shed light on how security events become visible and legible across communities of practice, contributing to the formation of policing subjectivities and the maintenance of broader regimes of vigilance. The analysis draws on qualitative research on two sets of sites that cultivate civilians' visual skills around urban security: video-surveillance control rooms managed by the security secretariats of Recife and Pernambuco, and WhatsApp groups dedicated to the policing of specific territories. This article seeks to deepen recent debates on how vertical and lateral forms of surveillance shape political communities and sociospatial divides.