The Digitally Defended Neighborhood: Suburban Racial Threat, Criminalization, and Participatory Surveillance

• In Event: Criminalized and Surveilled Behaviors: Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the proliferation of consumer surveillance devices and online community forums have provided new opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate in public crime control. This technological transformation can expand the reach of carceral surveillance and facilitate the racial profiling of people of color. This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate whether and how digitally-mediated forms of participatory surveillance facilitate racialized social control in suburban neighborhoods. I argue that participatory surveillance constitutes a form of digital neighborhood defense whereby residents respond to social upheaval in the form of suburban demographic change through racialized criminalization and monitoring in online forums. Spatial regressions on geocoded posts to Ring Neighbors—a hyperlocal social platform where residents anonymously discuss safety concerns—reveal that digital neighborhood defense is concentrated in racially diverse suburban municipalities. A qualitative analysis based on 65 interviews with residents of a racially diverse suburb of central Texas shows how these online discussions of safety construct a public narrative that marks residents of color living in rental apartments as suspicious persons. This narrative conflates actual criminal activity, such as porch pirates and motor vehicle theft, with innocuous or disorderly behaviors like public rowdiness, playing ding dong ditch, or simply existing in public spaces, rendering both legible as crime problems through racialized surveillance. Together, these findings show how ordinary citizens, empowered by digital platforms, define and amplify crime problems in ways that uphold a racialized vision of the suburban order and reproduce social inequality under the guise of upholding community safety.

Author

• Max Lubell, University of Texas-Austin