Contrarians at the gates: counter-surveillance and the defence of the commons in British police audit videos

Police audit videos have their origins in the so-called First Amendment audits or citizen audits that have recently become popular in the US vlogosphere. They generally feature anonymous working-class men equipped with cameras or mobile phones seeking to provoke confrontation with police officers over their right to move around and film outside police stations and corporate or military sites. Now the genre has glocalized to the UK, where auditing channels on YouTube, including Auditing Britain, Koleeberks and Marti Blagborough, attract tens of thousands of subscribers. Audit videos in general have received minimal academic attention and what studies do exist have focused on questions of legality or are exclusively US-focused. This chapter discusses British police audit videos as an expression of working-class populism that revels in the temporary inversion of social hierarchies in a distinctly carnivalesque mode. It is argued that police audit videos constitute a form of counter-surveillance, reversing the spectacle of working-class criminality that has been exploited and normalized in police-themed reality television documentaries in recent decades. While acknowledging their sometimes disrespectful and sexist modes of address, the chapter argues that police audit videos can nevertheless offer a valuable model for anti-authoritarian praxis. Like the figure of the ‘pleb’, as theorized by Foucault and Rancière, auditors insist upon their right to confront institutional authorities as well as to speak, move and act freely in public space in a context of intensifying neoliberal enclosure.