The scope of criminal legal surveillance, from the police to the prisons, 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, health, and criminal justice. Drawing on fieldwork conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, I show how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to allocate resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations. I then analyze how the adoption of big data analytics transforms organizational practices, and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven strategies. Proponents argue that big data can be used to make law enforcement practices more effective, fair, accountable, and objective, in part by stripping discretion from biased front-line actors. This research reveals the ways that police use of big data does not eliminate discretion, but rather displaces discretionary power to earlier, less visible parts of the policing process.
Sarah Brayne is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University and completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England.
In her research, Brayne analyzes the social consequences of data-intensive surveillance practices. Her first book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, draws on ethnographic research within the Los Angeles Police Department to understand the social implications of how
law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies. In earlier work, she developed a theory of "system avoidance," using survey data to test the relationship between criminal legal contact and involvement in medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions.
Brayne has been volunteer teaching college classes in prisons since 2012 and is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer teach college classes in prisons in Texas.
Dr. Sharon Strover is the Philip G. Warner Regents Professor in Communication and former Chair of the Radio-TV-Film Department, where she teaches communications and telecommunications courses and co-directs the Technology and Information Policy Institute. She is also a founding member of the Executive Team for Good Systems. Some of her current research projects examine local and statewide networks and broadband services; the digital divide; rural broadband deployment; telecommunications infrastructure deployment and economic development in rural regions; and Artificial Intelligence issues including social media-based disinformation
as well as publicly-deployed technologies. Her most recent publications examined disinformation strategies associated with Russian Facebook ads; local broadband deployment strategies around the world; and the role of broadband in rural regions. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission, the government of Portugal, the Center for Rural Strategies, the European Union, The Appalachian Regional Commission, several State of Texas Commissions and departments, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, Facebook, Google and others.
