[News] 21st Century Policing:The RISE and REACH of Surveillance Technology

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Via James Kilgore

The Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) and the Community 
Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability have produced a wonderful 
research report, 21st Century Policing: The Rise and Reach of 
Surveillance Technology.
<https://acrecampaigns.org/research_post/21st-century-policing/>

The report gives a broad overview of these technologies (including a 
little bit on electronic monitoring). The two things that are special 
about this report are the detailed description of the sector and its 
overall framing. The writers tells us how companies like Motorola, 
Amazon along with Police Foundations and system players have plunged 
deeper and deeper into these technologies with wonderful 
financial benefits for them and dire results for oppressed communities.
The second important thing about this report is that their ideological 
framing places these technologies in the context of the evolution of 
racial capitalism, connects this to the surveillance capitalism paradigm 
and calls for an end to it. Some recommendations and stories of 
resistance at the end provide some guidance about possible actions to 
resist this e-carceral onslaught.

____________________________________________________

https://acrecampaigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/acre-21stcenturypolicing-r4-web.pdf

Sitting at the intersection of criminalization and capitalism, the use 
of emerging surveillance technology has become increasingly popular 
among police departments in the United States over the last few decades. 
While public knowledge is still catching up to the full extent of the 
tools that police use, we are quickly understanding more about this 
technology each day. Adopted for use as police “reforms,” sophisticated 
electronics and tech capabilities do not address the unchecked power and 
ballooning budgets of local police departments. Instead, they open the 
door for law enforcement to monitor communities while private companies 
profit from sales and contracts. As the movement to defund the police 
becomes impossible to ignore, replacing police officers with police 
cameras is called progress.

The fact that law enforcement has rapidly expanded the use of 
technologies, including facial recognition software, Stingray devices 
(transmitters which scan and collect data from cell phones), social 
media monitors, and other surveillance tools without much transparency 
or oversight is also greatly troubling. This development has major 
implications for the violation of civil liberties—especially for Black 
and Brown folks. Especially if police adoption of technology follows 
broader trends in data science, police will continue to utilize machine 
learning and artificial intelligence.1Neither of which are well 
regulated to protect the privacy, safety and health of every day people.

The rise of “big data”—huge amounts of data gathered into systems that 
can store, combine, and analyze them—and new systems of surveillance 
have assisted in expanding the arm of police and policing throughout the 
United States.2While our research finds disproportionate impacts on 
targeted communities and points to ways that public accountability and 
ownership can end profiteering, the only way to end these practices for 
good is by dismantling the system of policing and building one that is 
truly just and that shifts our paradigm from one of punishment to one of 
care.

The irony of the concept of so-called “proactive policing”, which is 
purported to predict crime and stop it, is that it instead makes 
decisions about criminality for us—monitoring who is allowed to be 
inwhich neighborhoods and why as well as monitoring affiliations and 
social media, and predicting outcomes for people’s futures. This irony 
dehumanizes those being surveilled and does not solve for the root 
causes of crime, while also lining the pockets of technology’s creators 
and sellers—similar to the ways in which the prison industrial complex 
has operated. Living in a “surveillance state,” however, is not a 
foregone conclusion. Organizers across the country are pushing back 
against intrusive and problematic surveillance technologies by providing 
program models and model legislation to disrupt 21st Century Policing 
and ensure awareness and meaningful interventions. This report presents 
an overview of ongoing trends in police surveillance and the funding 
streams that have made and continue to make these trends possible. It 
also highlights ongoing advocacy efforts and provides recommendations 
for pushing back against the use of such technology by law enforcement.

Our five key recommendations are:

  * 1 Defund the police and invest in community safety
  * 2 End police surveillance data collection and sharing practices
  * 3 End all federal funding for police surveillance technology
  * 4 End all private funding of police departments
  * 5 Incentivize public accountability and control of public safety

Technology is now integral to our everyday lives, but it does not have 
to be harmful. No matter how it’s framed, surveillance technology is a 
threat to the safety and security of all people, but especially to 
communities of color. All forms of capitalism must go, including the 
surveillance capitalism that feeds racial capitalism.

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