Flockonomics
Flock and other handouts to the rich, and the ideology embedded in surveillance tech
The next time you travel along Milwaukee’s streets, try and count the cameras. Look at light poles, traffic light suspension systems, businesses, your neighbor’s front door, and your own cell phone. It’s not just the Flock Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras, which have drawn so much ire.
The Milwaukee Police Department has had to restrict the use of Flock to supervisors after an absurd, if typical episode. An officer was caught using Flock to stalk a romantic partner; then, in the course of the department’s investigation of that officer, one of the investigating officers was also caught using the system to stalk an ex.
Surveillance of this type sparks fears of abuse, not just of the ex-partners of law enforcement officers, but of others who do not enjoy the favor of the establishment, like protesters. It is feared that the state will become so powerful that effective dissent will become impossible. Locally, Napoleon Jones, of Sussex, filmed a traffic stop carried out by Waukesha County Sheriffs. Sheriffs then arrested Jones, and, when he complained, searched Flock data for his vehicle more than 100 times, pursuant, they say, to the investigation of his complaint. He is now suing, and we wish him justice.
Some are also concerned about the technology being used for “predictive policing,” using algorithms and artificial intelligence to quash movements before they start. These fears are not unfounded: Amazon uses a system like this, called “Atlas,” to identify potential hotspots of labor activism. When they have identified where union organizing could happen, they deploy union-busting middle management. The police already use systems like this for other purposes, so it is legitimate to be concerned about its use spreading.
The potential is frightening. But what the technology is used for on a daily basis is, like body cameras, more mundane, and more insidious. What it does is help police make cases against those with whom they have the most contact, by institutional design: The urban poor.
Police technology is a domestic version of military technology, when considered in an economic context. This makes sense, intuitively, because the police are themselves a domestic military, instituted to control an increasingly foreign-born working class for their bosses. This means that, without regard to what works either for policy goals or in technological or practical terms, your tax dollars are given to private companies which otherwise have no market.
To whom would Flock otherwise sell, if not the government? What is its product? It doesn’t even sell the cameras it owns; they are leased to local governments, which pay additional contracted fees for use of the service provided, namely the software used to view and analyze the footage collected by the cameras. Without public money, Flock is left without a business model.
This is one reason that Flock could be going under, but the controversial high-profile company is only the most visible current example of a ubiquitous surveillance regime. Body cameras are now used by most major police departments, the public having been told that they would promote accountability in the wake of big-news police killings of unarmed black people. They do no such thing. Research shows that body cameras do not lead to the police being held accountable, nor do they make police less violent. What they do is make criminal cases against poor people easier to prosecute. We should expect no less from cameras aimed at the poor by the guard dogs of the status quo.
At the heart of the surveillance logic, there is the rather silly idea that, if criminal behavior is caught on camera and successfully prosecuted, the behavior will be deterred and there will be a reduction in crime, without any attention paid to the conditions which gave rise to it. As we will see, this logic is embedded within the technology itself.
Surveillance cameras take social phenomena and distill them into individual cases; they are essentially liberal technologies. When Jake is on 4k in-store surveillance and ALPR cameras going from Home Depot to Walmart stealing things, we stop wondering about retail theft broadly speaking, about where it comes from and how widespread it is. We instead focus on the individual question of whether or not Jake did it, which he did. The same is true of body cameras. If Maria is having a breakdown, lunges at the police while armed with a knife, and the police shoot her, the question we have watching body camera footage is not about the role of the police as social service providers, or about alternatives, or why so many people have such responses. We focus on the facts of the case, whether and when Maria lunged at the officer. Such technology individualizes social phenomena, which is of great use to our courts, because they see things through the same sort of “personal responsibility” lens. When we want to understand a social phenomenon, we know to be skeptical of individual cases, of anecdotes. But when we want to fill our prisons, that’s the only view we can use.
The police and their technology serve and protect a status quo where the systemic causes of poverty, crime, disorder are never questioned. This is also why pushback against Flock is so inspiring. Anti-flock action defies a polarized view of political sentiment. It has spanned the country, with municipalities having people arrested for trying to speak against mass surveillance in public meetings. When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA dragnet surveillance in 2013, this is what supporters envisioned, but the moment was not yet ripe. Here and there the working class is rejecting being taxed so that our government can hand money to private enterprise, which tracks us wherever we go. We must be careful not to allow our attention to be focused too narrowly on Flock, so that we do not notice Axon or Motorola taking our money for similar systems. Surveillance, like other crimes, is not an individual phenomenon.
