Surveillance Underground

Abstract

Subway police work is preoccupied with the hidden nature of the deviance hunted and the visibility of the uniform worn. Uniformed subway police manage their visibility to provoke manifestations of suspects’ affiliations with deviance, and they work in concert to shape how bystanders perceive their interventions. The distinctiveness of subway security work is shaped less by the criminality specific to the subway than by the constraints created by the structure of subterranean space for managing the social meanings of police appearance. Central to the phenomenological tradition, the distinction between the visible and the invisible is treated here in an ethnomethodological perspective, not as a philosophical concept but as a crafted sensibility that constitutes the métier of subway policing. Phenomenology provides leads to the folk theories of social interaction that members of society employ to construct their behaviour and their social worlds.