The Influence of Transparency on Public Support for Different Police Surveillance Technologies

• In Event: Views on Education and Technology in Policing

Abstract

Police agencies increasingly use new technology and surveillance techniques to collect, aggregate, and analyze data on the people living in the communities they serve. Examples of these surveillance techniques include automatic license plate readers, camera networks, drones, and facial recognition software. Police agencies do not always inform the public and have sometimes fought to conceal their use of new technologies. Public support of police surveillance is often framed as a tradeoff between security and privacy – looking at to what extent community members will trade some measure of decreased privacy for some increased level of security. However, without transparency from police agencies, community members are not able to knowingly weigh options and engage in decision-making; the security/privacy tradeoff may not be meaningful. The measures of general awareness of surveillance technologies typically utilized in prior work do not fully capture the power dynamics involved in police surveillance. This paper uses a national urban sample of U.S. residents to examine the influence of transparency on public support for different police surveillance technologies.

Authors

• Liana Pennington, Saint Anselm College

• Matthew J. Dolliver, University of Alabama