Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing

by Sarah Brayne

Overview

The scope of criminal justice surveillance has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, healthcare, and marketing. While law enforcement's use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences.

In Predict and Surveil, Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190684099
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2020
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	953,486
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah Brayne is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, Brayne was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Introduction: Policing Our Digital Traces
Chapter 2. Policing by the Numbers: The Public History and Private Future of Police Data
Chapter 3. Dragnet Surveillance: Our Incriminating Lives
Chapter 4. Directed Surveillance: Predictive Policing and Quantified Risk
Chapter 5. Police Pushback: When the Watcher Becomes the Watched
Chapter 6. Coding Inequality: How the Use of Big Data Reduces, Obscures, and Amplifies Inequalities
Chapter 7. Algorithmic Suspicion and Big Data: The Inadequacy of Law in the Digital Age
Chapter 8. Conclusion: Big Data as Social
Appendixes
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The book reads like an encyclopedia of big data policing, supported by extremely rich empirical data in each of the coherently organized eight chapters...Grounded in solid fieldwork, this inspiring book provides far more than a case study of the police use of big data surveillance in LAPD. It provokes us to reflect the relationship among technology, policing, and our society. At a time when big data is increasingly penetrating our daily life, this book serves as a wake up call for those who are obsessed with technological solutions for social problems. Anyone interested in policing, big data, surveillance, criminal justice, and social control will benefit from reading this book." — Chen Shi, Asian Journal of Criminology

"Predict and Surveil draws compellingly on the tools of ethnography to investigate the tools of big data. It reminds readers that data are inherently social and that ignoring the social processes through which data are collected, analyzed, and deployed risks extreme harms." — American Journal of Sociology

"The author got access to observe the Los Angeles Police Department in operation and to see how "predictive policing" that relies on large-scale data collection and analysis actually works in practice. She reports that it opens the door to profiling individuals and neighborhoods, building detailed files on people who are not suspected of a crime, avoiding accountability through the use of outside contractors, increasing bias in sentencing, searching without a warrant, and other backward steps." — World Wide Work

"excellent and timely book" — Rachel Ferguson, The Library of Economics and Liberty

"Predict and Surveil is a breakthrough book, a close-up, ethnographically grounded, examination of how urban police departments are using the power of big data to try to anticipate crime and outflank criminals and how, in so doing, they risk reproducing inequality by embedding results of past discrimination inside opaque algorithms. At a moment when urban policing has come under unprecedented scrutiny, this volume provides indispensable insight into a critical element, big data, that could replace due process with guilt by association—or, if used properly, could help reduce discrimination and open policing to democratic control." -Paul DiMaggio, Professor of Sociology, New York University

"Predict and Surveil reveals not only the sociological drivers of modern police surveillance, but also how the sociological merges with data science to sustain the ideologies of race and inequality at the core of contemporary policing. Sarah Brayne skillfully combines the tools of contemporary ethnography and organizational sociology to show the distorting effects of tech-driven surveillance on the moral judgments that animate policing from top to bottom, judgments that animate invasive tactics that erode the dignity of citizens in everyday life. It is an astonishing accomplishment that should set off alarms in all of us." -Jeffrey Fagan, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia University

"A brilliant and necessary book. Sarah Brayne incisively reveals how big data is used in policing by taking us inside the precincts and cruisers, and observing first hand how policing platforms work. It's essential reading if you want to understand how data collection and algorithmic scoring are used in the work of police surveillance, classification, and control, and where it is failing us." -Kate Crawford, Distinguished Research Professor and cofounder of the AI Now Institute, New York University

"Predict and Surveil is a superb portrait of a police force seeking to take advantage of modern 'big data' technologies while trying to remain unbound by them. It moves smoothly from a first-hand account of how these tools are deployed by police officers to a sophisticated analysis of the organizational and institutional forces shaping the uses of information in social control. Lucidly written and compellingly argued, this incisive study could hardly be more timely." -Kieran Healy, Duke University

"Simultaneously eye-opening and terrifying, this pathbreaking book cracks open the black box of predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence to reveal how new surveillance technologies amplify police power, harden inequality, and threaten our civil rights. With theoretical rigor and ethnographic sensitivity, Sarah Brayne traces our digital footprints-who we call, where we drive, what we buy-as they pass from tech firms and intelligence agencies into the hands of crime analysts and patrol officers. Predict and Surveil sheds singular light on how big data changes law enforcement, and how we can start changing it for the better." -Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest and Ballad of the Bullet

From the Publisher

2020-08-28
A scholarly examination of the nexus of law enforcement and big data.

Brayne, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, combines data analysis and sociological and ethnographic research to explore some of the issues and controversies surrounding the country’s police system. While noting that there are more than 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S., she also points out a similarly disturbing statistic: “a third of this country’s adult population—over 70 million Americans—has a record on file with criminal justice agencies.” She continues, “although the rise of ‘mass incarceration’ receives the most attention, no one is incarcerated without first having contact with the police.” Though academic, this is a sharp book—and particularly timely given the current state of the public’s (dis)trust of police officers. Brayne explains the difference between “dragnet surveillance”—looking at everyone and deciding who is worth pursuing—and “directed surveillance,” in which investigators pick a target (a person or place) “deemed suspicious.” Either method uses tools that the police have adapted from the military or private companies, many of which stretch the boundaries of privacy laws. The author notes that the data brokering business is a $200 billion industry, so it’s not surprising when some of the basic tenets of “law and order” go by the wayside. Brayne also breaks down the “stages of predictive policing…collection, analysis, intervention, and response.” If anything goes awry in one of those segments, innocent people could be punished and arrested—or killed. Although the prose is fairly dry, with a focus on algorithms and concepts like “suspicion calculus,” the book shines a fresh light on old problems while also taking into consideration the many complexities introduced by technology. Brayne’s conclusion is not only direct, but important, as she walks readers through opportunities to craft change internally via institutions but also redefine what successful policing looks like.

A thoughtful consideration of modern policing.

Kirkus Reviews