Scar Tissue: The Ecology of Police Surveillance

New York, NY

By Drake Ryan Reed
social justice, police surveillance, race

Processing Misdemeanor Arrest data through 3 different mapping exercises to investigate Police Surveillance on Black and Brown communities.

The surveillance of the state, specifically police surveillance has left black and brown communities with deep trauma. This trauma is a form of scar tissue that is both visible and discreet in our bodies and within our communities. The skin tones that are displayed in my first mapping iteration was a color palette generated by Carto. I found this range in color a fascinating metaphor for the scarring that happens beneath the skin. This map is a bodily representation of the density and concentration of this scar tissue that forms in different parts of New York City due to police surveillance.

2021 Black Misdemeanor Arrests Density and Population (Scar Tissue)

(Black Non-Hispanic Population Density and Misdemeanor Arrest Density)
(Hispanic Population Density and Misdemeanor Arrest Density)
(White Population Density and Misdemeanor Arrest Density)

To understand this scar tissue of police Surveillance I decided to investigate NYPD’s Arrest datasets from the 2021 calendar year. The American police state and oppressed minority groups, specifically Black people, are deeply connected through history. it’s no coincidence that the KKK and the first cop division in Boston were created only 30 years apart from one another. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s surveillance program was formed around the beginning of the civil rights movement and it is now public knowledge that they spied on Martin Luther King. The year after the American City Race Riots in the summer of 1967 the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was formed. This administration would become the leading source of funding for militarizing the police nationwide and creating violent initiatives like stop and frisk. This history acts as an anchor for planting this investigation in the context of New York City.

During the Clinton era in the early 90’s many different events happened simultaneously to help shape the functions and priorities of policing today post 9/11. After the Crime Bill was passed New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner William J. Bratton started to reconstruct the NYPD. In their joint report, Police Strategy No. 5: Reclaiming the Public Space of New York, they dog whistle, racially charged motivation. They labeled activities that were “visible signs of a city out of control”. The report states “Boombox cars, public drunkenness, reckless bicyclists, and graffiti has added to the sense that the entire public environment is a threatening place”. This critique of public space starts with the term boombox cars which is a derogatory term to define black expression as negative and uncivilized. William Bratton redefined the “problems facing decent society”, which were categorized as behavioral traits tying peoples actions to a psychological disorder labeled as “anti-social behavior”. The commonality of these “problems” laid out by the NYPD is its focus on criminalizing everyday life for marginalized communities. This report was inspired by both the Crime Bill which pumped money into police departments and Broken window theory which imposed skewed research onto the reality of crime in America. Police Strategy No. 5 is a reflection of the nationwide strategy of giving individual precincts more power to enact arrest on ambiguous types of arrest like noise and standing around. The amount of resources that went into shifting the focus on non-violent arrest’s dramatically increased with these new strategies that gave police departments more defendants in the courts pushing criminalization. This formation of policing could not be carried out without the transition policing had in the 90’s after the Crime Bill and detailed through the Police Strategy No. 5 Report.

Census Data

(Black Non-Hispanic Population Density)
(Hispanic Population Density)
(White Population Density)

I made a research decision to use Black non-hispanic data as a centerpiece because my research revolves specifically around the Black experience. I decided to analyze 3 different racial categories from the 2020 Census: Black Non-Hispanic, Hispanic, and White. The Black Non-Hispanic & Hispanic population are the heaviest policed communities in New York City. Doing a comparative analysis of these 2 communities with the white population of New York City shows the extremely different realities of criminalization taking place. I want to depict an accurate representation of the racial makeup of New York City so I found census data via “HISPANIC OR LATINO, AND NOT HISPANIC OR LATINO BY RACE” per census tract. Race is nuanced and the Black and Latinx community has a large dimension of colorism and identities. I chose this data set specifically because of the data it provides on people who classify as more than one race. According to NPR the Census data from 2020 shows that people are identifying more with multiple racial groups because of shifting conversations and identity to whiteness. I chose Black non-Hispanic for this reasons to generally get a visual understanding of that population and how it relates to locality of Misdemeanor arrests. I also want to mention the inaccuracy of census data. The racial categories of the census leaves a lot of communities obscured into false representations. Many communities choose not to fill out the census in fear of surveillance by the American government.

Top Three Forms of Misdemeanors

The Data Collaborative for Justice released a report on conviction records from 1980’s to 2018. This report visualized the transition the NYPD mapped out in their No. 5 report. The report released in 2020 stated, “ From 1980 through 2019, there were 3,354,166 convictions that resulted from 10,884,240 arrests in New York City. Felony convictions comprised 23.2% of the total (778,527 convictions) while misdemeanor convictions made up 76.8% of the total (2,575,639).” This reality is the architecture of surveillance that has been built brick by brick in a house of criminalization. The criminality of black and brown people has been the main focus. From these records the largest demographic convicted were Black individuals at 53.9% and Latinx individuals 32.7%. Something that stuck out to me the most about the conviction record was the age range of Black and Brown people being targeted and arrested. The report also states, “For people aged 16-17, the Black enforcement rate was nine times greater than the white enforcement, 7.9 times greater for Black enforcement than white enforcement for 18-20-year-olds, and 7.8 times greater for Black enforcement than white enforcement for 21-24-year-olds”. How young people were criminalized and brutalized stuck with me the most in my research. I thought about the target on my back being close to this age group and a black person while coming to grips with this reality. I wanted to visualize the Top 3 forms of misdemeanor arrest taking place in relation to the concentration of black and Hispanic communities. I used the color palettes I generated from my initial scar tissue mapping for the 3 misdemeanors in a dot density formation. The Top 3 Misdemeanor arrests are Assault 3, Petit Larceny, and Dangerous Drugs. Below are the definitions of these Misdemeanors as defined by The New York State OpenLegislation Statutes..

Assault 3 in the Third Degree: Causing injury to another person, recklessly causing physical injury by means of a weapon or instrument.

Petit Larceny: Stealing of property

Dangerous Drugs: Controlled substance, Drug paraphernalia, Marijuana selling/possession, possession/Manufacturing of Meth, Possession of Hypodermic Instrument, and Sale on School grounds

Top 3 Misdemeanor Arrests of 2021

Misdemeanor Arrest Density Maps

(A demonstration of Predpol software from the Predpol police blog)

(A still image from QGIS, Black Non-Hispanic Population Density and Arrest Density)

Initially in QGIS I was analyzing arrest data in gradient styles. I realized this process of analysis resembled the logic behind police surveillance technology. Police Surveillance technologies like Predpol and Domain Awareness Systems are heavily implemented in police departments all over the country. Predpol is a computer program that uses algorithms to predict crime. This software was modeled after equations used for earthquake aftershocks and creates “temporary crime zones” via geospatial area. Domain Awareness Systems is mostly used by the NYPD and is one of the largest surveillance systems in the world. When filtering through different Misdemeanor arrests and its racial categories I felt myself becoming the logic behind violent police surveillance technology. I want this process to be a reanimation of the technology used against black and brown communities so that we can find ways of intervening and obstructing this tech. When overlaying population density with Misdemeanor Arrests density my map was not showing an accurate representation of where arrests were taking place and the proper amount. I decided to outline the average rate of each racial category in New York City overlaid with the arrest density of each race. This way you can see a clear picture of the density of where misdemeanor arrests are happening within the communities throughout New York City.

2021 Misdemeanor Arrest Density by Race