Unsound Science in Policing Technology: Corporate Resistance to Social Activist Critiques

• In Event: 40461 - Section on Sociology of Law Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Contested Group Boundaries

Abstract

The proliferation of surveillance public safety technology firms and their contract agreements with U.S. municipal governments ignites valuable explorations in private-public entanglements as well as how community activist groups seek to dismantle such relationships. Surveillance scholarship has likened surveillance technologies as digital manifestations of stop-and-frisk practices that utilize biased data to target low-income and racially marginalized communities (Browning & Arrigo, 2021). As technology firms continue to escalate in the corporate sphere, they are also infiltrating state activities to form what contemporary scholars have dubbed the “techfare state” (Bhagat & Phillips, 2023). Although ethnographies of the past decade have boldly exposed the inner workings of police departments, there still exists a gap in the literature regarding the private firms that provide police with technologies and services.

This paper addresses two empirical and theoretical questions. Specifically, how does a policing technology firm resist grassroots activist calls for a municipal contract cancelation? Furthermore, this research asks, in what ways does the political-economy of policing manifest itself in the undermining of critical independent scientific research? In order to answer such questions, I analyze a Midwestern U.S. city’s contract cancelation of CaliberSight AI, a market leading firearm detection firm known for its explicit municipal contract targeting along with a litigious aggression toward critics and market competitors. My preliminary analysis suggests that CaliberSight AI manufactures scientific uncertainty (Michaels and Monforton 2005) to undermine activist criticism and social science critiques. At the same time, the firm relies on local economic, political, and nonprofit brokers – akin to Tony Cheng’s observations in The Policing Machine (2024) – for product endorsements and urban political legitimacy as “a necessary tool in the toolbox.” Freedom of Information Act requests, multi-field site ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and qualitative coding of corporate materials compose this project’s data.

Author

• Gabriel Rojas, University of Chicago