Big Data Policing in the Homeland Security Era: ILP and Intelligence Fusion in History and Practice

• In Event: 445 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Paper Session. The Sociology of Big Data: Knowledge, Technology, Security and Privacy

Abstract

While there are new elements to “big data,” it is useful situate it and its effects on policing in a larger global and historical context. Indeed, the rise of big data policing is connected to larger changes in how states apprehend and manage social disorder. This paper outlines the evolution of big data policing through time in order to get perspective on its practical institution in social space. Historically, it traces the complex and contingent historical trajectory—or Foucault’s terms the genealogy—of big data policing. Historically, intelligence capacities of both military and police forces developed in relation to wars prompted massive leaps in the surveillant power of the state and that structured the arch of US global hegemony. After this genealogy, the paper draws on original research on the implementation of big data policing in New York and New Jersey derived from eleven months of field work and interviews with 68 people. Symbolically, big data policing is mixed up the politics of the Department Homeland Security and the wider War on Terror. Practically, however, the substantive work involves does not involve terrorism but instead concerns the desperate violence produced by deindustrialization and the retreat of the welfare state. Here, a case study on Paterson, NJ shows how the politics of the “Great Recession” led authorities to leverage “big data” to stem dramatic rise in drug-related violence. In this way, big data obscures the social determinates of crime. Big data may allow for “smarter” policing but it creates shallow politics.

Author

• Brendan Innis McQuade, State University of New York-Binghamton