Police and the Post-9/11 Surveillance Surge: “Technological Dramas” in “the Bureaucratic Field”

Abstract

In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police. This paper investigates the effects of the post-9/11 surveillance surge on state and local policing. It presents original research on interagency intelligence centers New York and New Jersey and deploys Pfaffenberger’s “technological drama” as a process animating the neoliberal constitution of what Bourdieu calls the “bureaucratic field.” Despite seemingly dramatic changes, there exists powerful continuity in the profession of policing. Before or after Snowden, the day-to-day reality of criminal intelligence remains shaped by the immediate demands of investigations and the small politics of interagency rivalries, insulating policing from dramatic reforms and swift change. What reformers see as dysfunction is better understood as a technological drama in the bureaucratic field that paradoxically provides a degree of autonomy and slows the pace of change. This paper builds on and contributes to the tendency within surveillance studies that emphasizes the ways in which human agents and organizational cultures mediate surveillance.

Data Corruption: The Institutional Cultures of Data Collection and the Case of a Crime-Mapping System in Latin America

“…However, as the motivations that drive police officers' data-collection practices show, the crime-mapping system became a site for labour contention. Such practices-however dishonest-can be understood as subverting responses to contemporary neoliberal bureaucratic forms of government based on performance metrics (Beer, 2016), confirming findings in previous research on related surveillance apparatuses in the context of the Global North (McQuade, 2016). Furthermore, the fostering of "data friction" through the deliberate tampering of data flows can be seen as ways to resist "technological regularization," enhance workers agency and autonomy, and exploit the system from within to reappropriate the technology in more favourable terms (Bates, 2017;McQuade, 2016).…”

“…Such practices-however dishonest-can be understood as subverting responses to contemporary neoliberal bureaucratic forms of government based on performance metrics (Beer, 2016), confirming findings in previous research on related surveillance apparatuses in the context of the Global North (McQuade, 2016). Furthermore, the fostering of "data friction" through the deliberate tampering of data flows can be seen as ways to resist "technological regularization," enhance workers agency and autonomy, and exploit the system from within to reappropriate the technology in more favourable terms (Bates, 2017;McQuade, 2016). Indeed, a few years after the crime-mapping system was implemented, officers hardly use it anymore because they simply do not trust the data they themselves have contributed to producing.…”

“…Instead of looking at the capacities of surveillance technologies, this study delves into the institutional cultures (McQuade, 2016) and agency of data collectors (Paterson, 2002) involved in the implementation of a crime-mapping system to assist policing work. The aforementioned system implements a model that approaches urban surveillance based on quadrants.…”

Strategic Incapacitation of Indigenous Dissent: Crowd Theories, Risk Management, and Settler Colonial Policing

“…In line with research that demonstrates how security governance is dependant on the accumulation of data that can be re-configured and re-interpreted through different data analysis practices (Amicelle and Iafolla 2017;McQuade 2016;Regan et al 2013), SITKA is an illustration of how databanking can be operationalized. The SITKA investigation pooled dispersed elements of surveillance data from across numerous policing agencies and created a list of 313 prominent activists.…”

“Now you’re connected”: Carceral visuality and police power on MobilePatrol

“… 2. Brendan McQuade (2016a, 2016b) documents the expansion of Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) across New York State. This has involved the funding of fusion centers and implementation of crime mapping, data analysis, information sharing, and integration of police technologies. …”