Digitize and punish: Computerized crime mapping and racialized carceral power in Chicago

Abstract

While critical attention has recently turned to racialized police violence in US cities, another quiet development in urban policing is taking place. Hundreds of police departments have begun to wed database software with geographic information systems to represent crime cartographically. Focusing on the Chicago police's digital mapping application, CLEARmap, the article interprets this development from the standpoint of racialized carceral power. It puts critical geographic information systems theory into discussion with critical ethnic studies and builds the case that CLEARmap does not passively ''read'' urban space, but provides ostensibly scientific ways of reading and policing negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor in ways that reproduces, and in some instances extends the tentacles of carceral power. CLEARmap's data structure ensures that negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor, the places they inhabit, and the social problems that afflict them are only representable to state authorities and the public as objects of policing and punishment. CLEARmap is also used at police-community meetings and via the Internet to adapt public perceptions of crime to that of the policing apparatus, and mobilize the public as appendages of police surveillance. By tracing these phenomena, the article casts a heretofore untheorized dimension of the carceral power into sharp relief.

Property as technology

“…This stance foregrounds emancipatory technological and propertied futures, and in doing so, find paths to navigate away from what Agniezska Leszczynski describes as predominant 'technodystopian' orientations (2019). Put otherwise, while remaining attentive to racist, sexist, heteronormative, and particularly anti-Black histories and technologies of mapping (Gilmore 2002;Jefferson 2017;McKittrick 2013), the AEMP finds ways repurpose mapping technologies for housing justice.…”

“…These new property technologies have grown into platform mediated urban governance today, continuing to lay claim to land and personhood in processes of gentrification, surveillance, and data extraction (Jefferson 2017;Mattern 2017;McElroy 2019a). Yet they continually recode prior understandings of land and data.…”

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

“…Digital technologies provide new ways to control urban populations and to mediate mobilities through uneven urban space. Across the globe, national and urban public security is being reoriented towards a data‐security calculus, in which members of the state and civil society are enrolled in mapping and surveillance exercises that codify and thus constitute particular places as risky through data‐driven algorithms (Leszczynski ; see also Jefferson ). While it is beyond the purview of this paper to document digital surveillance, hegemonic media and state officials in Brazil have indeed used digital infrastructures to variously surveil protest; cut communication between movement leaders; and discursively render racialized space as endemically criminal (see Gaffney and Robertson ; Melgaço and Botello ; Wood ).…”

“…But these digital practices are neither simply virtual nor do they flatten power relations. As feminist and critical race scholars of digitality note, new media is always embodied and often reproduces difference across race, class, and gender, as a function of who can access and encode digital information, as well as what populations and landscapes are the target of different digital visualities (Jefferson ; Leszczynski and Elwood ; Wilson ).…”

“…Through these new forms of autoconstruction, activists and journalists are creating and mobilizing specifically digital technologies, which are shaped by and reshaping racialized state violence. WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, and police accountability applications must here be understood as not simply virtual, but as technologies that mediate, and are mediated by, materiality (Jefferson ; Leszczynski , ). On the one hand, these digital technologies are crafted through material histories.…”