The Boys in Blue Are Watching You: The Shifting Metropolitan Landscape and Big Data Police Surveillance in the United States

Abstract

Despite decades of crime decline, police surveillance has continued to expand through a range of tactics oriented towards policing social disadvantage. Yet, despite attention to the linkages between residential inequality and policing, few studies have accounted for two intertwined structural developments since the turn of the 21st century: (1) the shift away from spatially concentrated patterns of racial segregation within urban centers towards sprawling patterns of economic segregation and (2) the turn from reactive policing towards proactive surveillance. Using the case of big data policing, we create a new measure of big data surveillance in metropolitan areas to examine how changes in segregation have affected the expansion of proactive police surveillance. In contrast to theoretical accounts emphasizing the role of police surveillance in governing economic inequality and perpetuating racial segregation, we do not find evidence that racial segregation or income inequality increase big data surveillance. Instead, much of the recent rise in big data policing is explained by increases in sprawling patterns of income segregation. These results provide new insight into the linkages between policing and residential inequality and reveal how changes in metropolitan segregation influence criminal justice surveillance in the era of big data.