Staying in the Game: Activation, Vigilance, and Normalization of Emergency Calls in Austria

Abstract

Influential accounts of vigilance and lateral surveillance assume that the shift from centralized to more dispersed, governmental forms of surveillance is driven by postmodern tendencies towards an almost unlimited proliferation of suspicion and surveillance. In contrast to former research, this analysis of Austrian public discourse on police emergency services highlights attempts to control, limit, and normalize civil vigilance. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of governmentality studies, the paper shows that emergency services are a paradigmatic field for the analysis of participatory surveillance because they align interventionist police power with people’s security activities. With the proliferation of an activation paradigm in Austrian policing their role shifts significantly. In this paradigm, a double-sided responsibilization and mobilization of citizens and police is propagated. On one side, active vigilance is discursively promoted to link local subjective awareness of anomalies and (dis)order with rapid police response. On the other side, in a phase of intense criticism, emergency services are subject to reconfigurations themselves: preemptive interventions, a normalization of response time, efficiency-oriented reorganization of its structure, and their application for the management of police resources and forces. However, it is shown that vigilance and response are always controlled, for example, by public rejections of particular kinds of hypervigilant activities. Emergency service discourse not only fosters but also limits vigilance. Therefore, normalization of oversteering hypervigilance points to paradoxes of governmental practices of activation in crime control.