Abstract
Now more than ever, scholars are wrestling with how to make our work impactful in the fight against authoritarianism, White supremacy, and hyper-xenophobia. The Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG) provides a promising model in Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago. The PCRG is a collective of current and former graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) who work with grassroots organizers to produce research that disrupts and ultimately contributes to the abolition of racialized state violence, control, and surveillance: a praxis they describe as countersurveillant abolitionist research. Through interviews, archival research, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, quantitative analysis, and community-based participatory action research projects, the PCRG examines and challenges racialized policing and surveillance.
The first substantive chapter, after the introduction, provides a history of data-based policing in Chicago. Data-based policing refers to “the role of police databases in transforming racialized archetypes into seemingly objective ‘facts’ and facilitating their circulation through webs of imperial policing” (p. 40). The authors demonstrate how, through information production, cleansing, and circulation, data are fetishized, painted as objective, and weaponized against communities of color. Chapter 2 focuses on the War on Crime/Gangs in Chicago and the concomitant growth of violence intervention organizations, entities that are often tamed and co-opted through partnerships with the state. The authors demonstrate how liberal reforms, undergirded by social scientific expertise and a policy of focused deterrence, expand the capacity of the state to target, surveil, and incapacitate racialized others.
In Chapter 3, the authors provide an example of a youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) project examining the role of gang databases in Chicago’s racialized and dehumanizing War on Gangs. In the process, the authors argue that criminalized youth of color should be recognized as experts on policing. In a series of methodologically useful insights, the authors discuss the everyday contradictions and complexities of a research project that includes university and youth researchers. For example, the PCRG encountered difficulty in identifying safe places to meet that did not require youth researchers to take public transportation that would make them vulnerable to street or police violence. The university researchers provided transportation whenever possible but at times, had to arrange taxis for the youth researchers. One time, a taxi driver canceled a ride because he refused to drive into the neighborhood where one of the researchers lived. This kind of granular description of the challenges involved in youth and community research projects is a valuable component of graduate education that is often overlooked.
Chapter 4 takes on the War on Terror as it manifests in Chicago around the archetype of the Arab/Muslim terrorist. Importantly, the authors trace the War on Terror back to the 19th century, when the U.S. Government labeled those who resisted U.S. colonial and imperial rule as terrorists. The authors also trace a post-September 11th diffusion of surveillance through webs of state and private sector actors and the simultaneous fusion or coordinating technologies and relations of surveillance. In Chapter 5, the authors critique Chicago’s 2012 sanctuary city policy, which restricts cooperation between the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as an example of carceral reform. Broad punitive exceptions in the sanctuary policy allow for CPD-ICE cooperation in cases where an immigrant has an outstanding criminal warrant, has been convicted of a felony, is a defendant in a pending felony criminal case, or has been identified as a gang member. The authors follow the case of Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez, an immigrant detained by ICE whom the CPD had categorized as a gang member, to demonstrate how disavowed collusion flourishes between local police in Chicago and immigration enforcement authorities. Consistent with the authors’ countersurveillant abolitionist research approach, the last substantive chapter describes how the authors, as part of a larger coalition, work toward abolitionist sanctuary through four interconnected strategies: (1) research, (2) community education and research, (3) litigation, and (4) organizing and policy.
Imperial Policing is most compelling when it illustrates how theoretical concepts (such as data-based policing) hit the ground in Chicago’s communities. For example, in Chapter 1, the authors map how the surveillance of political “deviants,” namely Black power and other leftist activists, set the foundation for the mass surveillance of criminalized Black and Brown people. This overlap between constructions of racialized political deviance and racialized criminal deviance is a key to contemporary criminalization that is frequently under-explored in mainstream surveillance literature. When the authors theorize at the macro level, however, they risk rehashing what is quickly becoming well-worn conceptual ground: automation bias and interoperability, for example (I would make this critique of my own work on immigration surveillance as well).
Imperial Policing is imminently readable, which is not a given for a book about surveillance technology. The book is not awash in acronyms and does not get caught up in minutiae. The authors instead maintain focus on that which needs to be known in order to effectively resist state violence, policing, and surveillance. Another important contribution Imperial Policing makes to the literature and movement discourse is the centering of an imperialism lens to explore policing and resistance in the metropole. In this sense, Imperial Policing joins other recent publications including Julian Go’s Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US (2023), which demonstrate a renewed interest in the shared White supremacist foundations of U.S state violence domestically and abroad.
Imperial Policing will be welcomed by graduate students and faculty who are frustrated with the insular, detached nature of academia and are looking to apply their research in an impactful way. The methodological appendix, which expands on countersurveillant abolitionist research and praxis, is helpful in this regard. Furthermore, throughout the book, the authors provide concrete examples of grassroots abolitionist work. I would love to see a second book from the PCRG that more extensively presents these models of abolitionist research and praxis.
