PRIVATE SURVEILLANCE AND SUPREMACY
On a spring day in 2018, a golf course owner in York County, Pennsylvania, called 911 twice, asking police to remove five Black women who were, in his view, golfing too slowly. CNN cataloged this and twenty-six other sad stories it ran that year of Black people being surveilled for living their lives. Among these stories was Sheila Stubbs, a veteran county supervisor campaigning for a seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly. As she canvassed for votes on the white west side of Madison, someone called the police, thinking she was a drug dealer. In a picture of her canvassing earlier in the year, she wore a badge identifying herself as a candidate, armed only with a clipboard, long pink-lacquered fingernails, and a winning smile.63
Barbecuing by a lake in Oakland. Entering one’s own gourmet lemonade business in San Francisco. A registered guest at a hotel in Portland, Oregon, taking a call from his mama in the lobby. A child mowing lawns for candy money in a Cleveland, Ohio, suburb. As with bird-watcher Christian Cooper being targeted in Central Park by Amy Cooper, these and other acts of “living while Black” caused a nondexterous person to call the police.64
The nondexterous person could be called Freddy, whether male, female, or nonbinary. Freddy feels more comfortable calling the police than accepting a Black person going about their business. The Black person is not free in these moments, not free to be Black and do things that white people usually do unmolested. The Black person carries this awareness of being watched, particularly by white people, everywhere she goes. Freddy is not free either—of socially constructed assumptions and a sense of entitlement to demand that the state enforce a certain social order. A common theme in stories of Black surveillance is boundary maintenance, both racial and geographic. Freddy acts on the idea that Black people don’t belong in certain places. As Elijah Anderson argues in a salient article “The White Space,” “In the absence of routine social contact between blacks and whites, stereotypes can rule perceptions, creating a situation that estranges blacks.”65
As with slavery, as with Jim Crow, law and social practice continue to conscript non-Blacks into monitoring and policing Black bodies. The worst of these social practices is violent vigilantism. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging in the brilliant light of a Georgia Sunday. The apparent mistake this twenty-five-year-old, dark-skinned man made was to run in a majority-white neighborhood and enter a home under construction.
Ahmaud Arbery lived in a diverse though traditionally Black neighborhood called Fancy Bluff, across a four-lane highway from Satilla Shores, a very white river-front subdivision with a mixture of working- and middle-class residents.66 Both neighborhoods were located in a majority-Black city, Brunswick, on the Georgia coast. Satilla Shores had Spanish moss and a few nondexterous and probably racist residents.
Arbery jogged nearly daily. He was familiar to his neighbors in Fancy Bluff and waved at them.67 But in Satilla Shores, modern-day paddy rollers, a white father and son, armed and dangerous, judged this young Black man running to be a burglar. One man called 911 alarmed, “There’s a black male running down the street.” Another resident called to report a Black man walking through an open construction site and then, also, “running down the street.” The dispatcher asked what he was doing wrong; the caller did not answer the question.68
Gregory McMichael, a former police detective, had been decertified as a law enforcement officer for repeated failure to attend mandatory use-of-force and firearms trainings.69 He appointed himself and his son, Travis McMichael, as patrollers. They chased Arbery in a pickup truck. A third white man, William Bryan, a neighbor of the McMichaels’, pursued in a second vehicle. Together, they hounded Arbery, and Travis McMichael shot and killed him. One prosecutor claimed that the McMichaels had acted lawfully under Georgia’s citizen arrest and self-defense statutes, seeing exoneration in a video where many across the nation saw murder.70
This is what living in white space can do to some people. Those used to being dominant, or unused to seeing dark bodies around, become suspicious of Black people doing utterly ordinary things. Jogging in daylight, being lost and asking for directions, listening to hip-hop while parked at a convenience store while a friend shops, or walking to his father’s house from an errand to buy Skittles are but a few circumstances in which white or non-Black individuals perceived a threat and shot to kill a young Black man.71
Ahmaud. Trayvon. Emmett Till. Prominent Black victims of vigilantes remain for a while in our collective memory as others are forgotten and new ones inevitably emerge. Old-time lynch mobs may have acted on different stereotypes than do modern-day vigilantes, but with the lens of “thug” now applied by so many, Blackness itself is still a provocation.
Arbery’s killers were charged and prosecuted; their acts deemed extralegal. But the state of Georgia enabled such behavior through permissive laws that make it easy to obtain a gun, and encourage rather than discourage using it. Georgia, like nearly three-quarters of US states, has a “stand your ground” law.72 The Georgia law eliminates any duty to retreat and entitles gun owners to use force when they “reasonably believe” it is necessary to defend themselves or others against death or great bodily injury or to prevent the commission of a “forcible felony” like armed robbery.73 Nationally, this legal architecture privileges white vigilantism against Black bodies. Where a shooter is white and the victim Black, a shooting is ten times more likely to be justified under a stand-your-ground statute than if the shooter is Black and the victim white.74 Georgia also has a statute that dates to the Civil War that empowers citizens to arrest fellow citizens they observe committing a crime if law enforcement is not present.75 As of early 2021, a bipartisan effort to reform the law was mounting though many advocates had demanded outright repeal, and a 2020 a bill to repeal did not gain traction.76 Again, old habits borne of supremacy do not die naturally.
Pre-civil-rights America acquiesced in lynching, never managing to pass an antilynching bill through Congress when Black bodies were actively being hanged, impaled, and burned in the most medieval manner.77 Nothing could be done about it, such was the strength of Southern supremacists in Congress and of sexual-predator mythology. In 2020, the effort in Congress to pass long-overdue legislation was stymied when Republican senator Rand Paul demanded a narrower definition of what constitutes a federally criminal lynching in the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. And yet, America largely tolerates angry white men asserting their gun rights.
Other laws quietly enable surveillance of Black folk to protect white space. Sundown towns of old have a twenty-first century tool to exclude. An estimated two thousand localities in forty-eight states have adopted “crime-free housing” ordinances that make landlords responsible for the actions or nonactions of their tenants. Legal scholar Deborah Archer surveyed these laws, showing how they perpetuate housing segregation using race-neutral tools and insidious racial habits of law-enforcement and private actors. These ordinances explode the range of activities that can cause an eviction, and they are applied disproportionately to Black tenants.78
Faribault, Minnesota, a small city fifty miles south of the Twin Cities, adopted one of the harshest ordinances in the country. It requires landlords to obtain a license and threatens them with revocation if they do not actively evict any tenants who violate the ordinance’s crime-free standards or otherwise cause a public nuisance. The landlord must conduct a background check on all prospective adult tenants and may consider arrests or even just contact with the police as a basis for denying a lease. The ordinance prohibits disorderly conduct by tenants or their guests and gives Faribault police the power to order an eviction without an arrest or conviction of any crime.79
Such ordinances are often adopted following an influx of racial diversity. The Black population of Faribault, almost entirely Somali immigrants and refugees, exploded in the first decade of the twenty-first-century—the number of Black households rose 542 percent. Most Black residents of downtown Faribault were renters. Longtime residents complained about increases
in crime and drugs, though police records did not support these claims. In fact, the overall crime rate did not increase dramatically in this period. The Faribault police chief admitted that friction and complaints were a result of cultural differences in how varied residents used public space.80
Racial animus, a desire to control Blacks entering previously white space, fueled the passage of the Faribault ordinance. Certain properties likely to be owned by whites were exempted. A single-family homeowner who rented to a relative did not have to be concerned with that relative’s history of contact with law enforcement. Similar exemptions applied in other crime-free ordinances across the country. Archer concluded that these laws were a system of racial control that “will intensify scrutiny and increase adverse police interactions,” for Black and brown people “turning everyday interactions into sources of anxiety, trauma, and indignity.”81 They also heighten the risk of homelessness for struggling descendants. The vicious circle continues. Archer concluded that by “spatially concentrating people with criminal convictions or other criminal legal system contacts into fewer communities, crime-free ordinances risk stigmatizing those communities, further perpetuating the negative impacts of racial segregation.”82
Nuisance laws, in particular, are a source of anti-Black surveillance. They offer opportunities for someone who doesn’t like something they see going on in the neighborhood to call the state and complain. One study of nuisance citations in Milwaukee found that properties located in integrating Black neighborhoods had the highest likelihood of receiving a citation. Researchers who interviewed police officers about their motivations in giving citations theorized police may have been particularly attentive to disorder in transitioning neighborhoods or may have received a disproportionate number of citizen complaints there, or both.83
Peoria is one of more than one hundred cities in the state of Illinois that have adopted chronic nuisance ordinances. These laws target landlords whose tenants are repeatedly cited for disturbances as mundane as noise and housing code violations to drug possession and violent crime. But only two incidents in a year could render a property an “aggravated chronic nuisance” and force an eviction. A 2017 lawsuit charged that more than 70 percent of nuisance citations in Peoria were in Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks made up only 27 percent of the population. Worse, the city deployed military-style armored vehicles that its police department nicknamed armadillos for their “intentionally ugly and obnoxious” appearance. The armadillos were outfitted with ten infrared video cameras, pointing outward and designed to let “repeat troublemakers” know the police were watching them.84 The lawsuit alleged these nuisance abatement vehicles were deployed at the request of politicians and well-connected local residents and were placed almost exclusively in areas with significant Black populations.85 In 2020, Peoria entered into a settlement of the lawsuit and committed to amend its nuisance ordinance and police practices to give targeted citizens more protection. Black Peorians will learn, eventually, whether these reforms are meaningful, though chronic nuisance ordinances persist nationally.
Ironies abound. When a descendant tries to seek protection from the state, calling 911, say, to control a violent partner, in places with chronic nuisance ordinances, she can be evicted if she calls two or three times.86 Descendants cannot win. They are surveilled, overpoliced, and underprotected.
The state and private patrollers also apply a lens of suspicion to residents of public housing. “One strike and you’re out,” Bill Clinton announced in 1996, ushering in a new era of meanness and strict enforcement toward public housing tenants.87 The one-strike policy allowed public housing agencies (PHAs) to terminate a tenant’s lease for criminal activity even if the tenant had no knowledge of the activity; the Supreme Court upheld this “vicarious liability.” A mother could be evicted for the clandestine actions of a son that she could not have prevented. The one-strike policy was a progenitor of crime-free housing ordinances applied to private rental properties across the land.88
As with redlining of old, the federal government led the way in teaching new habits of predation applied disproportionately to Black people. HUD also authorized local public housing agencies to ban nonresidents allegedly connected with criminal activity from entering a specified property and arrest them for trespassing. The vague criteria and the use of police to enforce these banishment lists restricted public housing tenants in their ability to invite friends, family, or guests, often with little or no explanation. In some cases, nonresidents were banned for the “offense” of just standing on the property.89
The Obama administration sought a different direction. In addition to calling on all localities to affirmatively promote fair housing, in 2015, it advised local public housing agencies to stop using one-strike policies for minor violations. And it reminded PHAs of their “obligation to safeguard the due process rights of applicants and tenants.”90 Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Kamala Harris introduced bills in the 116th Congress that would have repealed this one-strike rule, but the bills were never voted on.
Technology has made third-party surveillance of Black bodies even more efficient and pervasive. Ostensibly liberal San Francisco launched a mobile app, Open311, in 2013. It enabled residents to report perceived public disorder like loitering, trash, and vandalism, by taking a picture and uploading it, with their location. The 311 line was established in 2007 for nonemergency calls about quality-of-life conditions, which included noncriminal human behavior like congregating, sleeping, eating, or drinking in public spaces. After the mobile app was introduced, calls to 311 spiked, especially in gentrifying communities of color. Private spies invited aggressive policing, criminalization of ordinary behavior, and harm to longtime residents.91 Researchers found that San Francisco officers targeted minorities in gentrifying neighborhoods for order-maintenance policing and that relatively affluent white in-migrants played a role in this process.92 Young longtime Black and brown residents ended up beaten or killed by the police in hoods and barrios where whites were moving in.93
In any gentrifying neighborhood cultural friction is common and in-migrants may view longtime residents and their cultural and behavioral norms as criminal. Applying this lens and calling the police can actually criminalize what had been normal and dramatically shift cultural norms.94 In rapidly gentrifying hoods in New York City, researchers found a pattern of white in-migrants making 311 complaints about Black and Latinx folk because they commonly misinterpreted social and cultural behaviors as disorderly.95 This explains how 105-year-old Ramon Hernandez, who had played dominoes on his Harlem block sidewalk unmolested for four decades, became a target. According to research by BuzzFeed, in the two years that whites started moving in, the spot where Hernandez and another domino player regularly set up a card table appeared to be the source of over a thousand 311 calls. Someone kept calling, so the police kept coming.96
On neighborhood listservs and other social media applications like Amazon’s Neighbors or NextDoor, gentrifiers speak for themselves about their suspicions of longtime residents. The East Bay Express, a local newspaper, reported that white in-migrants in the Mission neighborhood and nearby Oakland were using community watch-group platforms to target African Americans and Latinx gente for “being near bus stops, standing in ‘shadows,’ making U-turns, and hanging around outside coffee shops.”97
Technology exacerbates anti-Black bias. One study looked at comments made over the course of a year on a listserv for a majority-white neighborhood. It overlapped with the first year of Obama’s presidency and suggested, as descendants well knew, that America was not post-racial. Black men overwhelmingly were the subject of suspicious persons posts, and in the majority of comments about them, the poster reported they had called the police, despite describing actions that in many cases were perfectly legal. A “very polite young man” also identified as Black, knocking on the door asking to borrow a cellphone charger became the subject of a suspicious person report, while a white “yard ma
n” going door-to-door looking for work was vouched for and no police were called, even though he was alleged to have engaged in burglaries. Those saying they called the police about Black men were validated by others, and this practice seemed to be normalized, amplifying fear of Black men and putting them, more than any other group, in direct contact with police.98
Neighborhood listservs seem quaint compared to the new infrastructure of surveillance created by doorbells with video cameras. Amazon, in particular, has encouraged a vast customer base to buy its video doorbell product Ring and upload videos of suspicious persons to its free social media crime reporting app, Neighbors. To date, Amazon reportedly has entered into partnerships with over two thousand police and fire departments, which encourage customers to share videos with the police.99 Together, Ring, Neighbors, and their users create a collective ecosystem of paranoia and fear, and a familiar, life-threatening mantra of “call the police,” applied mainly to people of color. Every dark body captured on camera is a potential porch pirate, and even the delivery person doing his or her job gets reported for not being sufficiently gentle with packages. Amazon applied for a patent for its facial recognition software, Rekognition, and may add that software to its Ring product.100
And yet the federal government’s own laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, found that facial recognition software, increasingly deployed by police departments and localities across the country is seriously inept in detecting nonwhite faces. Black Americans were one hundred times more likely to be misidentified than white men.101 A dark-skinned Black woman, Joy Buolamwini, used her MIT doctoral research to reveal some intersectional truth: facial recognition software tended to be most inaccurate in misidentifying dark-skinned Black women.102
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