Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Keywords

privacy, fourth amendment, police power, law enforcement, race, racism, digital surveillance, Devon Carbado, police violence, carceral technologies

Abstract

In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way for the development of slave patrols and other early iterations of policing where incredible acts of violence against Black bodies were made ordinary and essential. He explains how this legacy continues today with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence not simply failing to protect rights but rather licensing police violence in dehumanizing encounters with Black citizens.

This Essay reflects upon the many profound insights from Unreasonable, while grappling with what they may mean in an increasingly digitized and datafied police state. It argues that Carbado’s ultimate charge, to adopt a police power abolitionism framework that can disrupt pieces of the racially subordinating policing landscape, is not possible without theory, litigation, and advocacy guided by scholarship focused on the intersection of race, technology, and law.

The Essay applies a critical race and technology approach to examine a dimension of policing and criminalization that is taking new shape through advancing technology: collective state and private partnerships to control and monitor Black lives. It theorizes these practices as a form of crowdsourced surveillance that manifests in at least three ways: (1) in instances where law enforcement is given direct access to privately owned surveillance technology; (2) when private citizens are encouraged to use publicly owned surveillance technology to surveil fellow citizens; and (3) through digital public surveillance that is financed by wealthy private citizens and other third parties. This Essay makes the normative claim that while the efforts of private citizens and the larger society to work together with police in surveillance of Blackness is neither novel nor all encompassing, the emergence of crowdsourced surveillance measures present distinctly troubling features worthy of targeted research and advocacy, as they may act to further erode limited Fourth Amendment protections and expand the boundaries and harms of anti-Black surveillance.

Publication Citation

72 UCLA Law Review Discourse 362 (2024)

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Criminal Procedure | Fourth Amendment | Law | Law and Race | Law Enforcement and Corrections | Privacy Law

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