 So today I'd like to welcome Brian Jordan Jefferson for our fourth lips of the semester. Brian is an associate professor of geography and geographic information sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the editorial, he's on the editorial board of Urban Geography and a review and open site editor of society and space.org. His book, Digitize and Punish, Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age, will be published this spring by the Minnesota University Press. So with that let's warmly welcome Professor Jefferson. Thanks, Lentree, and thanks for all your organizing efforts. And it's really good to be back here because this project really started here, I was telling him earlier at the Hungarian pastry shop, a lot of it was originally conceived. And the project, or this is really the fifth chapter to my book, and what it's really looking at is sort of how carceral governance is extending but through the smart city form. And a lot of the things that were going on when I was here were the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and at the time Bloomberg was talking about having more cameras in New York City than London and it originally was for warrant error efforts but it sort of mutated into criminal justice. So one of the things I sort of wanted to start with is movie to sort of give a visualization and I think I hope this works of what I'm looking at. No spewing that Shenzhen has become one of the most important places in the world of tech. Nowhere else has quite as potent recombination of tech know-how, cheap manufacturing costs, and sheer speed. But it goes further than that. Living in Shenzhen is in many ways like living in the future. Not necessarily a utopian future. Or like the other kind. Trying to jaywalk in certain parts of Shenzhen and the government's spatial recognition will spot you. It was even a board of shame showing the faces of recent offenders. Shenzhen is the same ambitious plan created only present in video surveillance. The Shui Yan or sharp eyes project aims to extend and integrate video surveillance. It aims to use artificial intelligence, speed data and deep learning to analyze this mountain of video evidence to work out who's doing what, where and when to track suspects and the people they associate with and even to predict crime. Improving lives, increasing connectivity across the world. That's the great promise offered by data-driven technology. But in Shenzhen it also promises greater state control and abuse of power. Well good afternoon everyone, I guess it is afternoon. We're here at the Lowell Manhattan Security Command Center, our city's state of the art anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism coordination center. And as you know it is staffed jointly by NYPD officers and security representatives from the private sector. We also use open search areas, this public databases that are out there that we utilize. We use Google right up to any type of web page that's necessary to target our internal data. Link analysis we utilize again to see the associations and the connectivity of exactly how these people that are involved in the incident may be associated and this way get closer to solving the crime. So I want to give you a demonstration of being one of the police domain awareness systems which is an application that was jointly developed by police officers, New York City Police Department and representatives from Microsoft. We would hand out all cameras within 500 feet of the 9-1-1 call. Those cameras would populate on the screen here. We would hand them out to our data. They would say, you know the time you work with what they're planning to do on it. And so... At the rear of the pier is on a monitor. Sometimes it's captured on camera. A camera that can follow a bad guy trying to get away. The runtime for crime center is a chance for the police department to partner with the community to find new ways to keep our city safe. Analysts data, looking to slow the data in attempt to be able to predict where crimes will occur in the future. Looking for patterns that may cross precinct boundaries and monitoring all the cameras. Can the new strategic decision support Chicago? Are you going to monitor developments and gain conflicts in real-time? The built-in back ends are right there on the user interface. It makes it nice that I don't have to drag stuff out and open stuff up. I open it all up in my own stomach. And I realize that that way... In both having an officer on every corner, which is impossible for any police department, we're able to use technology as a force multiple times so that we can be in the places that we can't physically be in and see things we couldn't see and know what we couldn't know. And to be able to use all the different types of technology to get there in order to provide a safer period for our residents. It's definitely going to have an impact on the decrease in our crime rate. Here's some hangout locations for it. Here's the possible side. Then we're going to have to sit down. If we just sit down, I don't know what else to hope. Being able to adapt the technology to conflicts, practices... And we're going to put two hands together. We're going to say two hands at the same time. ...that will enhance officer safety. In a terrorist sense, you might be worried about things, right? But in general... I think one has half a million cameras and we're just getting started. So, I want to open up with that because you read a lot of the times that, oh my God, China is this authoritarian regime and it has this big sort of surveillance apparatus. But it comes from here a lot. A social credit system which looks at people that are risks. It comes from Wall Street. It was originally a financial instrument. The Ring of Steel, the cameras originally... Well, that's from London in many ways. And having those cameras, thousands of cameras feeding to central locations comes from Western democracies. They're inventions of Western democracies. And they've been used in many ways to surveil differentially minority populations. I had another video about the Uighurs. And another I think really ironic thing is the first video of the guy saying, Shenzhen, oh my God, it's a technological dystopia. It was Bloomsburg magazine. But if you go back 12 years, it was Bloomsburg who originally introduced one of these surveillance systems, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. So what I'm really looking at... And this is something that came to me sort of towards the end. I wish I would have thought about it more earlier. But this surveillance apparatus comes out of Western democracies. And I want to argue a little bit. It comes out and it's fueled by... I'll talk a little bit about the IT sector, at least in the U.S. context. So the title of the talk, How to Program a Carceral City, is what it's looking at is how cities, how the architecture of the Internet of Things is designed to help identify and capture undesirable people. But in many ways, that's... We have the U.S. Department for it. So the main thesis of the book is that this is the carceral system. This is the carceral state. The diagram where you have prisons, courts, and police, usually if you study criminology or criminal justice, is I think antiquated or becoming antiquated. And it's better to think about it as a database network. And one of the things that I'm looking at is sort of how the carceral apparatus is morphing or transforming through the database networks. And for my chapter five, the implications for the smart city. So if we think of the smart city, we think of how is it changing relations? How is it changing the way people navigate space? Or don't navigate space? I use a lot of the Fed. How does it change the way we conceptualize urban space? And then, of course, spatial practices between people, between the government and citizens. So the story for my research is like a lot of different books on mass incarceration. Ruthie Gilmore probably has the most famous one. William Julius Wilson also did a lot of work on this. Louis Wilkhan, a bunch of people. But it starts with the industrial city, or the breakdown of the industrial city. So if we think about mass incarceration in this country, we have to think about it in relation to urban political economy, at least to some extent. And if you allow me a broad generalization, we know during the high point of industrial urbanization, large parts of cities are essentially factories for industrial capital. And it brought with it its own transformations in urban space, whether you talk about pollution or the destruction of the natural environment. Transformations in social relations, urban populations start to expand rapidly, and you get a whole host of social and political struggle, whether that's union struggles or whether it's political struggles during the high point of, you might say, McCarthyism or something like this. But also technological relations change, or human technological relations start to change. Of course, as we get into the high point of industrialization, so one of the things we'll look at is sort of how people are, of course, becoming sort of expendable, vis-a-vis factory machines and the like. But also when we talk about the industrial city, it's important to think of how capital influenced urban policy, which of course influenced social relations, which of course influenced the evolution of urban space itself. So we can think of Pacific Mills of factories, we can think of General Electric with electrification and the extension of the workday, auto factories. But one of the things I was really interested in looking at was what would become telecommunications industries. So the computing reporting tabulation company, which is essentially, it went on to become IBM. Of course sold electromechanical tabulators to take censuses, which was very important in the early 1900s. And it wasn't only important just to keep tabs on the size of the population, but at the time differentiating white ethnics was very important because of the nativist politics, of course, and the anti-immigrant sentiments. And so one of the things I sort of look at is if we get one of those old tabulation cards, I'll sort of put a picture of one of the tabulation cards and the way that they differentiate, it was black, then you had about 10 different European nationalities slash ethnicities. There's no Asian, typically on these cards, no Latin American either. But it was a very important technology to be able to differentiate and keep tabs on different subgroups. And all of these companies you can say are, you know, interests sort of shaped the way that urban space evolved during that time. And then we get deindustrialization. Now, deindustrialization, there's a ton of literature on it, of course, in relation to mass incarceration. One way we can think of it, I think it's sort of neat and tidy ways through David Harvey's spatial fix, right? So you get capital and it comes into a city, it finds a workforce, it exploits the workforce, then it finds greener pastures. Maybe in rural America, maybe in the suburbs, and then eventually in newly industrializing countries, primarily outside of the U.S. And you might think about the way that space and the organization of populations evolves during the industrial period is through the enclosure, right? We can think about Foucault or DeLuz, and they talk about the enclosures. And one of the ways you deal with a mass of unemployed, ethnically and racially undesirable people is through prisons, right? Prisons mirror factories in many ways. But if we look at sort of the racial dimension of mass incarceration in relation to an economic transformation, we can go to the 1930s, you get the Great Depression, the gray line is unemployment, it heats up over 25%. The black line is new prisoners. And you do get a little, a modest increase in prison entries during the 30s. But if we go to 1980, and we look at new prisoners, it explodes by 300% over the decade. And in relation to, this would essentially be deindustrialization, prisoners in the high 70s that come from industrial cities. Now the question might be, well, why is there not such a tremendous spike in new prisoners during the Great Depression as compared to during the high point of deindustrialization? Well, we could ask the same question, why is there not a huge spike in imprisonment in rural America, right? Right now. Because a lot of de-unemployment in rural and middle America is coming from de-industrialization, but their unemployment is not understood as a crime, it's not understood as deviance. You might argue that when we look at rural or white unemployment that comes from de-industrialization, people start to become really good sociologists, and they start to talk about things like globalization, right? Now when it happens, of course, in the 80s, there's a whole different discourse. These people are lazy, they're undeserving, they don't deserve welfare, etc., they're terror-citing. And I think you can say the same thing for the 30s. So the way that we respond to mass unemployment, of course, is different depending on who's unemployed or underemployed, of course. And so if you are into the literature on mass incarceration, there's a general consensus that the prison is one of the mechanisms used to manage mass employment of disproportionately black and Latinx people. So just to further drive home the point of the social dimensions of carceral governance or mass criminalization, this is taken from the sentencing project in 2006. So these data, they're from 2006, but they're still, I think, startling. So in 2006, the average man, one in nine would be incarcerated in this country, which I think is insane. White men, one in 17, which is still, if you look anywhere else in the world, that's pretty insane as well. And black men is one in three, that's unfathomable. Latino men, one in six, unfathomable. Black women, one in 18, more black women are incarcerated in the U.S. than any male population anywhere in any developed western country. You could just say black women alone. And they are actually the fastest increasing subgroup of new prisoners right now. But you could look at Latino women, one in five white women, one in 111,000. So the point is if we go back to sort of deindustrialization, we have to think of, okay, factories Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, they're disproportionately black and Latino. And we get, this is sort of one of the ways that the state responded to the problem. The shrinking of the welfare state, the expansion of the penal state. And if we go back to the video and think of China, if we sort of try to be aliens and decontextualize ourselves from wherever we're from and just look at the data or look at the trends, it's very similar. Perhaps it's a precedent in many ways for thinking about dealing with them desirables. And it's not new of course, putting people in camps or in storage. But it definitely, the U.S. has contributed to that history. So these would be the social dimensions of carceral governments, right? Of course it's heavily racialized. Now, this was from here, and now I've learned that layer probably crunch these data. But this was the million dollar black project. And I said earlier, it was really important for the way that I conceptualized thinking about carceral city. So dark red is prison spending for black in New York City. As you might imagine, the overwhelming impoverished black and Latino areas. And then this is sort of the prisoner or prisoner to take up in the city out into rural prisons. And we know there's a recidivist feedback loop of going to and from the city to rural prisons. And there's a whole lot of literature on the political economy of rural prison industries, right? You get communities that are dependent economically on prison development. You get Walmart's hotels, restaurants, right? That becomes sort of dependent on the presence of prisons, which of course feeds back into policy lobbying, policy for harsher criminal justice policies. Now what I wanted to know is in looking at this and thinking about carceral government is more like a geographer. What is the socio-technical architecture or maybe I shouldn't use that word here. What is the socio-technical sort of substrate that accompanies this, right? And I got that idea by this quote from Ruthie Gilmore and Craig Gilmore. And they said, the state's management of racial categories is analogous to the management of highways or ports of telecommunication. Racist ideological and material practices are infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded and modernized periodically. My only issue with this quote is they used analogy and I just took out analogous. Well, of course in some cases it's analogous but we don't have to think of it as an analogy, right? The maintenance of racial categories has physical infrastructure. It needs physical infrastructure, right? Ways of segregating people, ways of supervising them, ways of containing them, right? Ways of surveilling them. It all requires some sort of infrastructure. So I think the question for us now especially those of us interested in decarceration and decriminalization politics and abolitionist politics is how is carceral, what does smart cities, what does the internet of things, change the geography of carceral governance, right? A total number of prisoners is at a 20-year low right now and that's no guarantee that it won't spike back up but that definitely seems like the trend partially just because of the amount of funding that it takes to incarcerate someone which is about depending what state you're in but in Illinois it's 25K a year so you can just put the person in college, right? 25K a year exceeds their market value, prisoners for the most part because if you look at some place like Chicago the average prisoner is living on around 10,000 a year so it's more expensive to incarcerate them and when we get the great recession you get a lot of city administrations going through their budgets and saying well wait a second this is really expensive, right? So there's one of the alternatives in New York State whether electronic ankle bracelets which of course are much cheaper but I'll get to that so my study is really sort of works towards looking at these issues during the smart city era and when I say smart city I'm thinking of two things, mostly the internet of things being sort of its infrastructural logic the internet of things being digital devices communicating with one another behind the scenes modifying processes whether it's energy provision or water provision right behind the scenes and of course it's used for everything from traffic to energy to home security and health care one of the things trains their schedules when they come can be automatically modified to account for changes in traffic that are observed by on the street so this type of stuff and the question is sort of well if we know that traffic has been adapted to IOT if we know that retail of course pretty much any major dimension of urban living has been adapted to IOT so has criminal justice provision and it's cheaper and in many ways more invasive mass incarceration and that's not to downplay mass incarceration because there are still about two million people incarcerated and that's not my intent but one way is to think of the infrastructural logic so in other words if we think of the industrial city as the factory and if we think of the prison as essentially that type of factory enclosure that's so common to the factory system and the way of thinking about organizing space that are tightly regulated then we can think of the internet the smart city through the internet of things at least to some extent through networks infrastructure networks where traffic is talking to energy provision is talking to security systems all behind the scenes so that's one of the sort of major things that I'm trying to think about as sort of a logic that is changing carceral governance the second is information capital which I take from Manuel Castells his network society but as an urban geographer so much of the work that looks at the way that city started to change in the 80s and the 90s focus understandably on finance of course how it focuses on the finance what is it called the financial coup in the city in the 80s and a lot of the great other great work focuses on real estate capital sometimes it is financial real estate capital but especially the work on gentrification is looking at the increased value of the properties and the ways that financial interest in real estate interest work in conjunction with city governments to try to find ways to kick out people who can't afford to live in a redeveloping city but I think one thing that's sort of a fraction of capital if you will that is not study that much information capital and some of it could be telecommunications or it could be software and I sort of put them under the umbrella of information capital IBM, Motorola, Oracle I would argue that they have as much influence over urban administration as pacific mills or Ford factories would have had 100 years of well maybe not 100 years I forget what year it is 100 years ago and the influence not only policy but they also influence social relations of course we're dependent more and more on this technology to live our social life and they're also shaping spatial relations the way that urban space is used the way that it's transforming in many cases so these are sort of the two things that I'm looking at urban is sort of adapted and mutated to the smart city through the internet of things and through IT interests so that's the question what happens when car sale government governance meets information capital and pretty much all of the stuff on mass incarceration focuses on industrial capital and they focus on the spatial fix they focus on factories leaving New York leaving Philadelphia leaving Detroit and sort of the vacuum that it leaves and the destitution that it leaves and that's part of Harvey's spatial fix capital leaves that finds greener pastures but there's another part I think that's a little bit neglected is that new fractions move in and again we've talked about finance and real estate but also IT so I the book looks at both New York City and Chicago but figured I'd do New York City the sort of story of the sort of smart car sale city begins it really begins post 9 11 and in 2005 the lower Manhattan security initiative the plan to first draw on the LMSI and this initiative was essentially we're going to put 3,000 cameras primarily around tourist areas and areas of financial importance and the idea is a lot of stuff is on facial recognition the cameras didn't necessarily have facial recognition but they had different technologies some would be able to identify objects such as a backpack that's left unintended there's also recognition software of your gates of how you walk which comes from Israel because the idea is you can spot a terrorist by how they walk they're also environmental sensors audio sensors etc and the basic idea is it an anomaly or something or something suspicious is detected by a camera it would automatically alert a command center but then it also automatically alerts the nearest patrol unit that's available to intercept or to observe what's going on so it's this game of sort of being able to almost warping urban space being able to capture identify or capture undesirable anomalous or suspicious behavior at a faster and faster clip and that's sort of the basic idea of the security initiative of course it draws on London's Ring of Steel one of the things that Bloomberg was intent on was beating British and having more cameras and after the LMSI was announced I think two years later there's the Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative which was just an extension of the original one and then we're getting up to 10,000 cameras according to reports but these are I don't know how those data are sort of it's difficult no one knows how many cameras are in any of these major cities but it also had different sensors one would be license plate meters on patrol vehicles but also mounted throughout the urban environment and again every bridge and tunnel that led into Manhattan was fitted with a security camera so it created sort of what I like to think of almost like a moat a 21st century moat or at least being able to detect who's coming in who's coming out the last article I read was 2016 and there were 17 billion scans or something in the database but it wasn't only license plate meters there were also audio sensors some were gunshot detections but others were looking for upticks of noise of crowd noise from people there were also environmental sensors radiation sensors and these types of things and again the idea was to have this network of machines that like one of the guys in the video said would be the eyes and ears where to multiply the eyes and ears of the police and again it starts off as a war on terror initiative it's related to counter-terrorism but it morphs into the NYPD's everyday policing of crime around 2012 so the domain awareness system is a piece of software created co-created by the NYPD and IBM and one of the central applications is called the crime warehouse and the idea here is that people who have criminal records become undesirable suspicious objects just in their mere presence and this is where the facial recognition the struggle becomes important because if the technology works it usually doesn't but it will eventually someday and you have to think of this picture of the images we saw in China but they would be here too facial scans being able to instantly identify people with criminal records and you can just imagine the implications of that but domain awareness sort of signifies the transformation of these they're called data fusion centers from national security to everyday criminal justice and that I think is the important thing and you have to think of it in relation to networks of cameras networks of sensors networks of patrol cars as well all being fed into centralized locations and machines having the ability to alert without human intervention but also humans of course using it to intervene without computers but the point is that I believe that there's an externalization of the carceral system so if the carceral system is predominantly in these three branches prisons, police, courts my argument is it's provading, it's spreading through the actual urban architecture the material space and at the core of it is this sort of power fantasy and I don't think that it's ever this efficient and that's always something that I think it's important to watch out for to say this is some totalizing completely efficient machine because it's not there of course still in efficiencies people don't always use the information there are misfires, there are mouth functions etc but the point is just thinking about the tendency and the horizon that this marriage between IOT and carceral governance portends so what I see is an externalization of the carceral state and just to look at a couple initiatives to come out of the Domain Awareness Center one was the mobility initiative and okay this was originally giving a lot to the officers mobile phones with their own specialized suite of applications they're originally Nokia phones and one of the women that were in video tish she's the director of the information technology bureau for the NYPD she got in hot water a while ago because they bought like $30 million worth of these phones but then the operating system was defunct and they weren't updating it so they had to fill them all out then they got asked but the important thing and that's where tax money is going that's another thing that I think is important about thinking about IT and one of the things I found on my project which I did not think are the billions and billions of dollars of tax monies that have gone into prototyping these technologies I also probably should have said the Domain Awareness system is a proprietary technology and it's sold all across the US but even outside of the US and New York City I think it's 30% of the other 70% right but we have to think of in terms of criminal justice and technology a lot of it what I found is total type by tax payers money in 2015 the Department of Homeland Security opened up its Silicon Valley office which essentially funds startups which tells them what they need and the startups develop it so that's something but in any event the mobility initiative of course it was a suite of apps for patrol officers and of course you could do things like search one sites et cetera and they can draw on databases whether they're in upstate New York the National Crime Information Center in West Virginia other fusion centers across the country they have instances of access and that's one thing but another thing that I'm interested in are forms and now officers prepare and transmit incident reports on the street and it's not a radical transformation but what I think it's doing is it's externalizing criminal processing onto the street and again I'm thinking of trends or tendencies so none of these things I think taking in isolation is that radical of a transformation but the bigger picture is that criminal booking is now done on the street it turns the police officer in many ways into a data processor which is ironic because in China that's what police do at ages of violence they more so are taking data they're recording data and that's what they're doing in the US but they have guns as well so that would be one the mobility initiative another would be electronic bracelets e-carceration sometimes it's called and this would be mostly for people on parole and probation and in 2000s when I say 7 or 8 it was right around the recession Upstate New York starts their ATI their alternative to e-carceration and they start using ankle bracelets and then in 2015 there was a big expose in the times about juveniles of migrants' prisons and I think it was good they were taken out of the prisons but they were getting ankle bracelets but the ankle bracelets are on one hand movements are traced movements are predicted but another interesting thing about ankle bracelets is they have what are called geofences I'm sure you guys are familiar with it but a geofences is essentially if you step across this latitude and alert will be sent to the nearest available patrol officer so again this externalization of being able to monitor and manage people's and again it's not as horrific as being in a prison but still you can sort of see a different horizon of carceral management coming into focus Another technology you might think of is Comstat Comstat 2.0 and 2.0 is when the NYPD put their crime database online now an interesting thing is you get a couple developments out of this one is network surveillance once every day citizens were able to enter data into the database or complaints via the website I argue that civilians started becoming sentinels of policing, of surveillance in some ways another thing is of course looking at the data of people who use these maps as we know to determine where they want to live where they want to travel where they want to eat and things like this increasingly so in many ways I think these online databases they sort of influence people to see like a police state so if you know seeing like a state I agree with that but this is seeing like a police state it's looking at people and some who have done of course vicious crimes but others who are drug criminals and it's keeping constant track of where they are where they're concentrated and I think it makes us think of the city is this place of even more partitioning where we want to go where it's desirable, where it's undesirable and it adjoins this the average civilian to participate in that visualization so one of the things that happens is the NYPD so much video footage and that's one of the most important things which they're very heavy data payloads, video and they ran out of storage so they signed a 25 year lease and they occupied three floors in the Verizon center and used their data storage so again you see this collaboration between telecommunications and the city and you can imagine I don't know a hand but almost at least probably cost it's over 20 years so there are three theses that come out of the work first that database networks are extending the war on crime and drugs and of course I'm sure we're all familiar with there's the one argument that we know of course this is just another iteration of using science or scientific discourse to normalize or to justify state violence state exclusion on differential administration of people which is an old story there's nothing new about that but that's part of the picture right now we don't even think about well should we really be using police force and monitoring and surveillance and the criminal justice system as the main mechanism to deal with urban poverty and urban marginalization and unemployment and underemployment that you know well if a machine says oh there's the bad guy then it sort of skirts that debate in many ways and you know one of the things that I found in the process of writing a book was this is in many ways more liberal invention that goes back to Lyndon Johnson law enforcement administration agency I think the technocratic solution because it's a sanitized way of doing something that often I think many liberals would jump on Reagan for doing massive criminalization mass incarceration if you look at after-furbishing there's a famous pamphlet it's an Obama task force that looks at it's called policing in the 21st century and essentially what it's saying is we have to look to the IT sector to help us deal with racial policing and for instance the cameras were one of the big solutions and if you know the politics of the cameras some of them it turned out they were using them not only for police civilian interactions but also for surveillance and Taser International which makes the cameras that the NROPE uses they're within less than a fiscal year their profits went up by 75% after and maybe it is better but I think to have the cameras but I think it's important to think about the underlying relations and also the underlying legacy of the law on crime and drugs second IT sector is really this extension I think it's pretty commonsensical if they want to sell cameras or software if they want to sell more so they'll never be lacking in a reason for a new technology to use to surveil or to manage crime third this IT carceral nexus is transforming geographies of carceral power and that's what I mean by an externalization of the carceral state and then lastly these developments pose new challenges and opportunities for abolitionist politics and another thing I met a child of Foucault in many ways so I always have to resist this urge of this sort of totalizing autonomous power that's unstoppable it's not unstoppable but it does pose new challenges and it also poses new opportunities in many ways to use the data against the state so if I have like a database of the Chicago police and it says that I think it was like 89% of all people arrested for vandalism it was something in the 90's 90's percentile people for gambling 75% of people for drug crimes are all black or Latino you don't really need to make an argument they've already made it for you it's not like black and latino people came together and said let's commit more crimes at some point it's a function of the policy and so I do think new opportunities for abolitionist politics are opening up through this sort of excessive documentation that never aligns on technology but to get that you'll have to buy the book in next spring thank you what is how important to be in the face of this seeing somebody in the eye but really by the time when it gets there they don't care if they're cool or not they've already been arrested there's an enormous imbalance in the technological capacities in the schools of data in higher obviously oh yeah so how can the types of community and profits and places where many pastors and attorneys do support technologies and processes were developed and funded by either funding for war or funding for criminal justice yeah well I think they are so in Chicago there's the mihente movement in the city San Francisco of course was the first city to abolish the facial recognition cameras and then shortly after that a city in Massachusetts I forgot its name did I think that was the question sort of how can we sort of intervene one way is I think how we think about data so like if the police say 90% of people who commit crime are black I have a quote from 2012 where the police commissioner said 60% of people commit crimes are Jewish I think there are precedents for people critiquing the use of science and data science and again I think that's like the least interesting part of my research the use of science from phrenology to statistical social science in the 1890s so if anyone really read Jabril Muhammad I forget it, Jabril Muhammad's book called The Condemnation of Blackness he looks at the history of how social science and social statistics were used in the late 1800s and early 1900s so I just think it's another chapter in the story of how science used to justify these types of policies and I think if people want to get interested looking at the history because when I first started out with the project I would say oh this new thing everything's new and then I started all the way in 1890 with the census tabulator machine which of course became IBM and it was the same story a lot, different target, different context but I would think not being so president not thinking in the present but thinking about how these things have been done throughout history and looking at how people in the past have dealt with it it's a good way to look at it but I don't think it will come from the academy though to be honest an abolitionist strategy I'm concerned that I feel in the way that some of the critiques that I'm seeing coming up of smart cities and the shifting politics of the progressive state is that using languages of disparity and inequity by focusing on the disproportionate ways that the effects of surveillance and criminalization fall on targeted populations specifically black and Latinx populations that may have this unintended effect of naturalizing the overall surveillance process and seeing like the only thing that's wrong with it is that it's disparate in its application so can you suggest any retort these strategies or ways of approaching it politically that any knowledge white supremacist formulas are in the ways that specific populations are targeted but also focus on the underlying surveillance architecture yeah, well I think it's an inherited word abolition it's abolishing the system of governance which does in general and of course it's connected to broader politics of surveillance but I guess I would come from the other direction and say one of the issues is when we talk about surveillance as if it's evenly spread often times and I do see that a lot in especially media studies which doesn't really have it doesn't why use racial capitalism and most of the stuff on race that I've read and you know I'm not in media studies but it's more about how people express their selves or how they're mixed recognized by an algorithm but for me I think the danger is thinking of this as an evenly spread out process and I think the way that smart cities or big data companies sort of people's relations to them are different so if you're middle class it might be stealing our private data which is a huge problem but it might not be cameras in our actual living space it's one of the things I should have put in that I left out public housing the domain awareness system was extended through public housing so I think it's a great point that we have to think of this as a system of governance that needs to be critiqued in its entirety but I also think it's important to not make false equivalences between the ways that some of the most marginalized people their relation to technology which is probably much different than our relation to technology in this room I feel hysteric when I see my leftist friends or abolitionist peers willingly using facial recognition on their phones for example and it feels to me sometimes just hopelessly ubiquitous like we're kind of all hitting our lives over and then there's a more optimistic part of me that doesn't make people just don't understand like the change toward the landscape as you were saying so I'm just wondering what you think about galvanizing the left and making this an issue that people are really motivated to use I think it's galvanizing itself they're seeing the electronic frontier foundation is big and I think there's a lot of anti-facial recognition politics that is sort of popping up on both coasts there's people are getting the ankle bracelet stuff I think it is sort of popping up throughout leftist politics using it in our personalize has a different story but I do think it is and again I try to think like both ways or dialectically about it of course it's new forms of power and surveillance are evolving new opportunities are evolving for networking for networking activist groups so I think it's important to not have a one-sided story be techno pessimists and sales bad it's this big totalitarian thing which it kind of is but it also has new opportunities I think for organizing and I do think that people just looking at news clips are starting to really catch on to it the thing though I think is it's so late that we catch on to it's so late in the book I show a lot of the stuff is originally proposed in the 80s and trickled out in the 90s and even if you look at something like Facebook it took us like 20 years to figure out what their business model was so I think like more people are becoming interested in the issue when they're doing digging and they're starting finding oh wait this is a problem bigger than we thought but I think it I think slowly it's happening yeah oh yeah yeah yeah I mean I don't have anything more sophisticated than saying they want to sell software and hardware the IT industry for me one of the more the interesting things about the political economy is how the state not only co-designs it also funds the development of a lot of these technologies as well but I mean I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that IBM if they could sell one package of domain awareness they'd want to sell two or three and I just think it's an old story of you don't want to mix economic incentive and incarceration a good person to look at this is W. E. B. Du Bois noticed this after slavery and he noticed this within convict lease system which was a system where you would have prisoners released out to industrial railroads, mining companies and what do you see? You see this rapid explosion of black prisoners so I think the real story is you don't want to mix economic incentive and incarceration or punishment it's like it's one of the most dangerous combinations you can have and that I guess was one I saw as maybe a task that the book was just to expose that link and I think a lot of people could do much more better empirical work on it than I did I remember one person she was asking well how much can you quantify the profits and I don't even know how to start to try to do that I try to expose the link and then hopefully it can be developed oh sorry yeah yeah yeah I would start with Neil Smith um his book with the gentrification frontier or stuff on the revengeous city um there's Louis Guacan who's a bit of a lightning rod but he does work on that stuff too in Chicago most gentrification David Wilson is in my department he wrote a book called Black on Black Inventing Black on Black Violence um but yeah I would start with this but yeah there is a lot of that stuff it was funny so one of the things I did for the book when I was doing research here was talking to grassroots groups and they were saying this was like 2005 2006 they already saw policing was transforming in ways to abet gentrifiers so I think they've been on to it for decades oh sorry do you think your body the technology in which we're going actually have partnerships in your body similar to the others every time you walk through an intersection you're going to be automatically identified I would not surprise me but hopefully I won't be alive by then but I mean you already see it in Amazon and you're using it for employees and to track employees movements and their productivity it wouldn't surprise me in the far who knows how fast the technology develops but I do think that's the importance of sort of you know back to the earlier question about how do we galvanize it's not that again I'm not like a techno pessimist but it's how are we using this technology and I think you do see a lot of people younger people who are saying becoming more critical of this and more aware of it so hopefully they can stem off that future but the way things are going now I don't see why not is that considered equal incarceration oh yeah yeah yeah but I mean one of my arguments is we might have inspired that system the US and again it's an ethnic minority putting essentially a camp which ok that's not new but also some of the facial recognition things you know when they're walking around in just an open street like they'll be identified and these things can be sent to authorities they can be sent to stores for purchasing things and all the rest of it but I don't think I think the idea that it's that radically different in China than it is in the US is overrun and perhaps orientalist I don't think it's as radically different as like the media likes to like to show I mean they got the technology the social credit score that they use again that's a Wall Street invention the only thing they centralize it but we disseminate the technology through the private market I don't know what's worse history shows it could be worse if it's disseminated through the market it could be more unstoppable if it's corporations rather than a central governmental bureaucracy saying we're using this power so participation of parents individual behaviors will retrench or reinforce the problem like in 1999 oh yeah or is or is actually right how eyes on the street and the neighborhood are often plotted as ways that or were seen as ways that sometimes the systems can be pushed or shifted towards them seeing like at least a very different value yeah yeah yeah so how are the mechanisms are they indicated in a value in a way that the institutions well well for the first part in warping space I mean mostly I'm mostly just talking about patrol cars and response time and making it I think the fantasy is having instant response to anything undesirable or seeming out of place or anomalous and in that sense what the cameras do is they cut down on response time and that has a history that goes back to the 40s with their problem CAD computer aided dispatch and it was displacing human operators for dispatch calls using sort of really well primitive computing technology but now we use it through the IOT and the idea is just if you could if this trend continues uninterrupted you can't imagine a future where people have biochips and they do anything wrong jaywalking you can sort of have this instantaneous authority pop up almost materialized out of space but the second question that's tough one I think it's a really good question I think so having people sort of see like a police state and be sort of surveillance sentinels for the police it's usually rolled out in the language of community policing and data democratization and these types of things and this happened before big data and I noticed it when I did research here with community groups in Bed-Stuy who they were civilian anti-crime activists and you know I went in there and by the end of my research I was like they're just functionaries of the police right now they had real problems there was of course violence and crime but in many ways the police were trying to mobilize them to expand their surveillance capabilities so I think it does it's more it contributes to the ubiquitousness of the police and of police surveillance and it's cheaper and you know you could fit this into some the older bull story of devolving administrative duties from the state to the communities or the private sector so I think all of those things are at play