(iPoster) Camera Raj: The Digital Turn to Policing and the Comparative Surveillance State

• In Event: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics & Science, Technology, and Environment
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics

Abstract

In this study, I engage in an ethnographic comparative analysis of the emerging “surveillance technology state,” taking a dialectical scalpel to the burgeoning problems of social coercion, legibility, and discretion within the Digital Turn to governance by examining the police. Street-level bureaucrats, such as police officers, have significant discretionary power in policy enforcement. If the State is concerned with maintaining “the monopoly of violence,” then police officers act as the face of the State by directly interacting with citizens, which affords them ample opportunity to make decisions about the use, management, and threat of force. When police officers make decisions justifying the arrest of some groups more than others, they may produce inequality and hierarchies of citizenship.

While there has been ample research on the discretionary capacity of the police, what remains less clear is the nature of this relationship and its implications for state capacity since the proliferation of digital technologies in governance in the 1990s. States have begun equipping police officers with body-cameras and incorporating CCTVs into their system for monitoring, managing, and distributing violence and justice. In the last 5 years, the rise of artificial-intelligence and facial recognition tools have also complicated the trajectory of digital surveillance, at risk of making policing automatic or algorithmic. The emerging surveillance state now has a digital face, creating in-effect a Camera Raj – a system of rule and order governed by camera, symbolizing new horizons of the State’s gaze. To what extent do police officers enforce or resist implementation of the State’s gaze in using digital technologies? How do police officers, as agents of surveillance, become sites of scrutiny themselves, in the manufacturing of new accountability metrics?

This theory-building piece examines how the Digital Turn in governance has transformed police officers' discretionary capabilities in making arrests, exploring the impact of expanded state surveillance, algorithmic datafication, and increased legibility on the exercise of state capacity and violence. I engage in comparative ethnographic work, drawing from interviews of police officers and government civil servants, participant observation, an analysis of governmental information requests and public arrest records, and algorithimic policing databases to compare trajectories of the emerging surveillance technology state in India, the United States, Spain, and Japan. India is home to the world’s largest camera-trapping assemblage, deployed by India’s Forest Service to investigate and combat wildlife crime. Hyderabad, at the frontier for technological development in the nation, has become India’s most surveilled city, experimenting with predictive and automatic policing systems. In the United States, Atlanta averages the highest number of surveillance cameras per capita compared to the national average. The Atlanta Police Department made the landmark decision to incriminate 61 activists protesting a police-training facility in the city, using data gathered from digital tools that scrubbed public social media accounts, changing the space in which policing operates. In Spain, the VeriPol program enables the police to make claims about the legitimacy of crime incident reports made by victims, which in turn conditions whether the police mobilize to respond. Comparably, Japan developed CrimeNabi, a predictive tool powered by artificial intelligence that attempts to map out where police should patrol and respond to crime.

I find that the digital turn to policing destabilizes the monolithic idea of the State, highlighting contradictory responses to the expansion of surveillance technologies. On the one hand, elected officials may call for expansive directives, in part for public safety and encouraging new modalities of self-governance, and in part for spectacle, flexing the reach and capability of government oversight, even where development has proven to be challenging. These officers, when compliant, may perpetuate discriminatory incarnations of policing on marginalized communities by increasing their visibility to the State through expanded digital reach in their legibility projects. Through digital technologies, police officers might find themselves scrutinized by managerial relations, evaluated by and made to comply with new protocols for digital rollout. On the other hand, police officers resist legibility by their supervisors in an attempt to continue engaging in discretionary behaviors, just as every-day civilians may attempt to avert the gaze of the State. I find that while states have promoted the rapid incorporation of digital technologies into the policing structure through justifications of enhanced state capacity and efficiency, the messiness of implementing these technologies complicates the reality of these visions of oversight.

Author

• Charitra Shreya Pabbaraju, University of California, Berkeley