Ethnographies of Police Power in the Cyber Ecosystem

• In Event: Technologies of Policing; Policing as Technology – II

Abstract

In his 1997 ethnography of the LAPD, Steve Herbert proposed that police power is defined by its capacity to “make and mark space” (Herbert 1997). This paper examines how the relationship between police power and urban space is reimagined through the cyber ecosystem and suggests that an STS ethnographic method offers productive openings in theorizing police power. Specifically, I draw from ethnographic research in Augusta, Georgia, home of the newly constructed Georgia Cyber Center. Spurred by the relocation of US Army Cyber Command to nearby Fort Gordon, the Georgia Cyber Center is the largest US state-sponsored cybersecurity center to date and stands to dramatically reorganize the city’s historically Black downtown. As one center official repeatedly emphasized, the goal of the Georgia Cyber Center is to “create an ecosystem that is self-sustaining”—an ecosystem that exceeds the cyber center’s digital infrastructures and extends into the surrounding environment of the city. Within this cyber ecosystem, cybersecurity-driven urban redevelopment and related practices of displacement are attended by data-driven models of policing, some of which emanate from the very operations of local, state, and federal police agencies within the Georgia Cyber Center. Placing theories of police power (Neocleous 2000; Dubber 2005; Seigel 2018; Wall 2019) in conversation with STS ethnographies of practice and place (Mol 2002; Stengers 2005; Choy 2011; de la Cadena et al 2015), this paper meditates on how the security project of the cyber ecosystem invites a more capacious investigation into the environmentalizing practices of data-driven policing and police power itself.

Author

• Andrea Miller, Florida Atlantic University