How Technology-Assisted Surveillance Promotes Racial Bias in Policing

In an essay for Literary Hub, R. Joshua Scannell argues that policing has become an "inhuman" practice, run on black-boxed algorithms that even officers don't fully understand. He points to California's post-Prop 47 partnership with Microsoft to build risk-assessment tools, and cites repeated failures of ShotSpotter, facial recognition, and body cameras. Yet the essay says investment in these technologies keeps rising, and that they end up treating people, especially people of color, as statistical future threats rather than citizens. Scannell calls this logic the "carceral surround," a system that makes humans products of the carceral technology industry as much as its authors.

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