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Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing
The scope of criminal justice surveillance 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, healthcare, and marketing. While law enforcement's use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences.
In Predict and Surveil , Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.
A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety.
In Predict and Surveil , Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.
A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2020
35 people are currently reading
592 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 1, 2021
This book does and does not do many things. It's great in the sense that it provides a lot of information on police surveillance and big data. To that end, I consider it to be an essential read for everyone as the surveillance net continually grows wider and includes alleged offenders and non-offenders alike. However, I would also recommend not reading it alone. Read it alongside "Race After Technology" by Ruha Benjamin, "Dark Matters" by Simone Browne, and/or "The Condemnation of Blackness" by Khalil Muhammad. As much information as Brayne provides on police surveillance, she does not take a very critical lens of analysis. She talks around racism, capitalism, and abolition throughout the book. She also recommends that we use big data to hold police officers "accountable." I get that she was collecting and analyzing data prior to the recent wave of abolition, but given how much prior work on surveillance, data, and statistics (such as the ones I listed above) very explicitly talk about abolition and critique systems of oppression, it's kind of baffling to me that Brayne does not seem to be in conversation with these seminal works and lines of thought.
January 11, 2021
palantir sucks. police sucks.
Read this to get an ethnographically grounded account of surveillance for my thesis � in that sense it was pretty good, especially with discussions of palantir and privatization of surveillance more broadly. That being said, the book talks about bias and inequality, but not racism explicitly? Felt like the book could use a good dose of Simone Browne's Dark Matters (who is also a surveillance scholar at the same uni as Brayne?!). A lot of talk about big data, and the author argues for more inversion of the surveillant gaze onto police as a way to reform and make police better. I wonder how this book would be different if she had started the book more recently (police abolition ... yeshi milner's abolish big data ...) but that all points to her whiteness
Read this to get an ethnographically grounded account of surveillance for my thesis � in that sense it was pretty good, especially with discussions of palantir and privatization of surveillance more broadly. That being said, the book talks about bias and inequality, but not racism explicitly? Felt like the book could use a good dose of Simone Browne's Dark Matters (who is also a surveillance scholar at the same uni as Brayne?!). A lot of talk about big data, and the author argues for more inversion of the surveillant gaze onto police as a way to reform and make police better. I wonder how this book would be different if she had started the book more recently (police abolition ... yeshi milner's abolish big data ...) but that all points to her whiteness
April 1, 2021
Author started with the higher-ups at LAPD and got clearance for officers to talk to her about the use of big data in policing. Lots of good information from that. Also a fascinating presentation of the idea that the Bill of Rights was not written with the current capabilities in mind, and that instead of trying to argue about how to interpret it, we need to get another group of geniuses together, and soon, and write a new Bill of Rights that works for modern technology.
The policy proposals she makes are ones that I hope will turn out to be the right ones, but here we are still lacking proof, or even (in this book) good example stories to support them. In many of these areas we are going to have to be willing to gather more information and understand reality better before we can hope to change it favorably.
The policy proposals she makes are ones that I hope will turn out to be the right ones, but here we are still lacking proof, or even (in this book) good example stories to support them. In many of these areas we are going to have to be willing to gather more information and understand reality better before we can hope to change it favorably.
November 5, 2020
Policing in the United States is at a breaking point. The past year of Black Lives Matter protests and legal rulings, like the recent Kentucky grand jury’s decision not to indict the Louisville police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, have continued to show that US policing is rarely held accountable for the harm it causes. And in an institution that exerts the state’s monopoly on violence, to lack legitimacy is a precarious position indeed. Sarah Brayne’s recently published monograph, Predict and Surveil, looks at how the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) use of surveillance technology has changed its approach to policing and how police culture views the entrance of all this new tech. A Professor in Sociology at University of Texas–Austin, Brayne uses ethnographic research and attentive observation to examine a culture that is notoriously taciturn.
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April 25, 2023
This was based on research from 2015-2016, so it's pretty outdated as we enter the true AI age. Some lessons still apply, though, especially if you're thinking of straying outside the law: 1) Don't think you can hide your location; between your noisy cell phone and scads of security cameras, you'll fail. 2) Don't bother to try to keep a low Internet profile; you're constantly leaving bits of data for site owners to buy and sell 3) Don't hide anything at home; once Big Data and AI provide the cops with enough to establish probable cause, a judge will issue them a search warrant. 4) Don't be black, definitely don't be black. 5) Always remember these two questions: "Am I under arrest?" and "Am I free to go?"
March 26, 2021
In Predict and Surveillance, Sarah Brayne creates an inside look into the Big Data that police use in large metropolitan areas specifically Los Angeles. She created a lot of areas of interest that we all need to consider.
I read this book with some of my high school students. Many of them never before considered how the data collected by everyday technology and other information systems can track everything we do..... and say.
I’m not sure if the information is entirely � Groundbreaking �, It is a useful and informative book. I recommend reading it.
I read this book with some of my high school students. Many of them never before considered how the data collected by everyday technology and other information systems can track everything we do..... and say.
I’m not sure if the information is entirely � Groundbreaking �, It is a useful and informative book. I recommend reading it.
April 8, 2025
This book exposed the numerous different techniques and technologies that the LAPD has and uses to solve crimes as well as predict them. It talks about the unequal amount of surveillance that marginalized communities are forced to endure. It also touches on the hypocrisy of the police unions that they feel they don't need to be tracked and monitored in a similar fashion even if it can save their lives. If interested in the way technology plays a role in policing I highly recommend this book.
August 13, 2023
This book provides a wonderful commentary on the implications of privacy, big data, algorithms, the fourth amendment, and how all of this plays into policing. The author takes you through her research seamlessly, providing sociological questions for her readers on the implications of privacy, big data, and policing, and everything that can become intertwined with them.
April 9, 2023
Last couple of chapters a bit redundant and not saying a lot - but great insights into police practice and attitudes.
October 31, 2023
another thesis read, really interesting but they reiterated SO much information that i got bored
June 17, 2021
Rich with an inside look into LAPD, their engagement with surveillance technology, and their ambivalent attitudes towards it, Brayne provides a necessary conversation, and peak, into the future of policing amidst big data. All of this, of course, done amidst the backdrop of an empirically-grounded project. But while rich, Brayne's major emphasis on the 'social' nature of data is not new. Scholarship from figures such as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have already brought attention to this fact. Moreover, they provide a more analytical account of what goes on within what Brayne terms 'dragnet surveillance,' an ultimately vague term that dances around more in-depth conversations of race, capitalism, and inequality.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
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