How Technology-Assisted Surveillance Promotes Racial Bias in Policing
Policing and incarceration in the twenty-first century are not wholly human practices. The strategies, tactics, and encounters that organize the carceral state are developed and prosecuted in collaboration with inhuman technologies that “we” do not and cannot fully understand. In
In the twenty-first century, policing and incarceration have become heavily reliant on technology, often without the full understanding of human participants. The human element in policing is frequently diminished by design. Critics must now analyze policing in the same way they scrutinize other industries that are deeply embedded in digital media, such as finance.
Policing is an inhuman practice both ethically and technically, as many of the tools used are opaque and unexplainable to those on the front lines and decision-making officials alike.
The carceral surround refers to the logic that connects various incidents, such as the NYPD's 2020 siege of Black Lives Matter activist Derrick Ingram and the precision targeting and abduction of international students opposing genocide in Gaza. This logic encompasses the network of computational technologies that enable the instantiation of carceral power as a fundamental force of contemporary capitalism.
This force is rooted in a populational logic that utilizes statistics and algorithms to distribute the state's violence work.
In the 2010s, data became abundant, leading digital media companies to claim they alone could understand the vast amounts of information. In the carceral field, this led to the promise of tools that would eliminate uncertainty and subjectivity from legal decisions, creating a mathematically perfect antiracism in criminal justice. This convergence was most evident in California, which launched a Supreme Court-mandated effort to decrease its prison population under Prop 47.
Prop 47 reduced certain drug convictions from felonies to misdemeanors and allowed for resentencing. It required resentencing for any other inmates unless the court found an unreasonable risk to public safety, determined by various factors, including the offender's criminal history, types of crimes, extent of victim injuries, and rehabilitation records.
This shift in focus allowed officials like Commander Will Brown, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department officer in charge of its Prop 47 transition, to imagine a redesign of the entire criminal legal system.
Brown sought to use risk to "basically level the playing field" and re-evaluate how criminal justice operates in the county, removing all labels that had been applied over the past few years. The sheriff's department turned to Microsoft to help facilitate this vision, linking data silos, providing software and hardware for GPS tracking of parolees, and developing an efficient data analytics system to analyze agency databases and surveillance information in real-time, determining risk levels of individuals encountered by the police.
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