Surveillance And Resistance: Police Use of Technology and Activist Mobilization in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

While a growing body of literature explores police technologies and their general implications, there is a gap in the literature around empirical study of what is actually happening on the ground and how resistance is mobilizing. By centering activists as a lens to investigate police practices, my research captures how police in the San Francisco Bay Area are utilizing surveillance technologies and how activists have mobilized to resist and challenge their use. I examine what the state publicly says that police should be doing with regard to technology usage, what media accounts say they are doing, what organizers reveal them to be doing in practice, and how organizers are responding. Through my empirical analysis, police and state rhetoric of “public safety” clashes with activist narratives of police abuse of power in an increasingly harmful and controlling surveillance state. Surveillance technologies are portrayed as “essential” for stopping crime when in reality, this framing is part of a utopian techno-solutionist orientation that obscures ongoing injustices exacerbated by dragnet surveillance, racial targeting, and public-private partnerships. There is a clear mismatch between state claims and practices. In response, activists are mobilizing through policy and legal channels to hold the police accountable, fight surveillance, and break down police power.