Resources

Sitting at the intersection of criminalization and capitalism, the use of emerging surveillance technology has become increasingly popular among police departments in the United States over the last few decades. While public knowledge is still catching up to the full extent of the tools that police use, we are quickly understanding more about this technology each day. Adopted for use as police “reforms,” sophisticated electronics and tech capabilities do not address the unchecked power and ballooning budgets of local police departments. Instead, they open the door for law enforcement to monitor communities while private companies profit from sales and contracts. As the movement to defund the police becomes impossible to ignore, replacing police officers with police cameras is called progress.

Living in a “surveillance state,” however, is not a foregone conclusion. Organizers across the country are pushing back against intrusive and problematic surveillance technologies by providing program models and model legislation to disrupt 21st Century Policing and ensure awareness and meaningful interventions. This report presents an overview of ongoing trends in police surveillance and the funding streams that have made and continue to make these trends possible. It also highlights ongoing advocacy efforts and provides recommendations for pushing back against the use of such technology by law enforcement.

HRDAG’s analysis and expertise continues to deepen the national conversation about police violence and criminal justice reform in the United States. In 2015 we began by considering undocumented victims of police violence, relying on the same methodological approach we’ve tested internationally for decades. Shortly after, we examined “predictive policing” software, and demonstrated the ways that racial bias is baked into the algorithms. Following our partners’ lead, we next considered the impact of bail, and found that setting bail increases the likelihood of a defendant being found guilty. We then broadened our investigations to examine the risk assessment tools that judges use to make decisions about pre-trial supervision, and we found evidence of racial bias in the tools. Most recently we have returned to considering the challenges of documenting police violence.

A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that employees at law enforcement agencies across the US ran thousands of Clearview AI facial recognition searches — often without the knowledge of the public or even their own departments.

This 2018 report does not take a top-down policy reform or recommendation approach, nor does the report seek more “transparency” and “oversight” of policing, an institution that remains inherently violent and flawed by design. Instead this report, rooted in the community and our fight for abolition of policing, takes us on a journey exposing the multiple tentacles of state violence including – the creation of the “other,” knowledge production and the deep complicity of academia, corporate profit, and the deadly impact and trauma of programs such as Predictive Policing on our communities.

A report on research by Abolish APD that details Albuquerque Police partnerships with private firms linked to neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites and the CIA, as well as highlighting lack of transparency and honesty around APD’s use of these programs.

This report is an in-depth review of the period of May 29 through June 7, both chronologically and analytically. The report aims to present, to the extent possible based on the information and material available, a comprehensive account of the facts, including how involved parties––members of the public, CPD’s rank-and-file, and CPD’s command staff, among others––experienced the protests and unrest. This report provides an in-depth public narrative of and accounting for CPD and the City of Chicago’s response to the protests and unrest in late May and early June of 2020. In doing so, this report presents findings on operational failures and shortcomings during the response, which have broad implications for CPD’s policies and practices going forward.

From monitoring traffic to preventing crime, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras have a range of purposes. But with increasingly-high resolutions, more remote access to live video streams, and the utilization of technologies like facial recognition and Ring doorbell cameras – just how much is too much when it comes to police surveillance? This resource collected data about some of the most surveilled cities in the United States, correlations between increased surveillance cameras and reduction in crime, and further areas of concern.

Chicago is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world. Cameras, automatic license plate readers, cell site simulators and many other surveillance devices are currently used in the city by the Chicago Police Department and its sister agencies. However, many Chicago residents are unaware of the scope of the surveillance systems, their huge cost, and the privacy implications of their use. Lucy Parsons Lab surveys the major parts of the surveillance system in Chicago with respect to costs, capabilities, efficacy, and legal and privacy concerns.

This report was written by Pascal Emmer, Woods Ervin, Derecka Purnell, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Tiffany Wang for the COVID19 Policing Project, hosted by the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability. It gathers and expands on regular project updates, and is the first in a series on the impacts of policing and criminalization in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.