The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from the police to the prisons, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and criminal justice. Drawing on fieldwork conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, I show how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to allocate resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations. I then analyze how the adoption of big data analytics transforms organizational practices, and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven strategies. Proponents argue that big data can be used to make law enforcement practices more effective, fair, accountable, and objective, in part by stripping discretion from biased front-line actors. This research reveals the ways that police use of big data does not eliminate discretion, but rather displaces discretionary power to earlier, less visible parts of the policing process.
About Sarah Brayne:
Sarah Brayne is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. In her research, Brayne uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the social consequences of data-intensive surveillance practices. Her first book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford University Press), draws on ethnographic research with a large, urban police department to understand how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to allocate resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations. She demonstrates how the adoption of big data analytics transforms organizational practices and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven strategies. In previous research, she developed a theory of "system avoidance," using survey data to test the relationship between criminal legal contact and involvement in medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions.
Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer teach college classes in prisons in Texas. She has been teaching college classes in prisons since 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, Brayne was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University.
This seminar will not be recorded.