Race science and surveillance: police as the new race scientists

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between race and the urban in the United States through an examination of the role of surveillance – a growing global phenomena in contemporary western cities – and its uses in creating and maintaining boundaries of race, particularly because surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups tend to be grounded in specific and bounded geographic locations. Using historical evidence and data from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop and Frisk program during the 2003–2013 period, this article asks whether or not, strategies of state surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups should be interpreted as a ‘new’ type of scientific racism given the state’s desire to deploy and its hyper-reliance on technologies to fulfil its surveillance role.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• crime
• race science
• racialization
• surveillance
• racial state

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the context of a racial state, the census is anything but mundane. From the first census in 1790, people – those free and in bondage, and regarded as nonperson – were classified in the census by racial category, labor status, and gender, e.g. free white male.

2 Term borrowed from Murji (2009) to mean here norms based on social bonds common in all societies and not defining of a society, such as a bond based on an element particular to a society. See

3 Many scholars and law enforcement practitioners do not acknowledge five periods: They do not count the colonial or early republic era and begin the count at the 1840s with the formation of the first forces that paid people full-time to do policing, e.g. the NYPD. They also do not count the period I identify as the fifth, for many still consider policing to be operating in the “community policing era.” I share the contention of those that an era, based on information technology revolution and the post 9/11 practices, is emergent (Hooper, 2014; Cole et al., 2015).

4 The Draft Riots of 1863 also occurred during this period of policing. They represented days of violent eruptions white – Irish – working class New Yorkers protesting the federal government draft for the Civil War. During this resistance, rioters burned down a police station house. This violence included white mob and union worker-led attacks on black New Yorkers.

5 Borrowed from Foucault to mean state mechanisms focused on individual bodies and populations to arrange outcomes that serve the interest of the state (2009, p. 16).

6 Browne (2015) theorizes this as white supremacy. My reading of her work does not separate white supremacy from white nationalism.

7 Indentured servants, who fought in the Revolutionary War on the side of the colonial government, earned their freedom. See Roediger (1999).

8 The construction of the term white represents a major departure from the use of the term race to reference a nation or ethnic group.

9 A court declared as unconstitutional the SQF stops as practiced under the Bloomberg Administration.

10 Emphasis mine.

11 Although 60 of the 18,000 police departments across the U.S. use predictive policing, it is in operation in some major cities. In addition, it was field tested in New York City during the summer of 2015. See Black (2016). New York City’s policing practices have national and international influence.

12 I use the first of the three elements of Foucault’s meaning of governmentality. (2009, p. 144).