The History and Continued Significance of Radio Policing for Racialized Social Control

Sophie Fajardo, Independent researcher
Chris Graziul, University of Chicago

Current debates about surveillance capitalism and data colonialism have opened significant inquiry into the relationship between modern forms of subjugation and historical colonial and capitalist logics. While many scholars focus their attention on cutting edge technologies associated with extracting data from racialized communities, in this paper we contend that social science historians can offer critical insight to these debates by focusing on stable technologies of social control that link time periods and geographies to reveal “contemporary and evolving, relations between colonialism and capitalism” (Couldry and Mejias 2021, 788). Focusing on two-way radio transmissions between police dispatchers and officers, we first contextualize development and use of this sociotechnical system in the British Empire. We then trace its institutionalization in Chicago to produce and coordinate knowledge about Black and Brown bodies in support of their subjugation through space-based social control. The role of the Chicago School of sociology in promoting police reform (i.e., through urging adoption of radio policing as a tool) and ongoing concern about racial disparities in policing make Chicago an ideal case study for understanding the long-term effects of what Go terms “imperial feedback” wherein practices and technologies from the colonies are imported for use in domestic law enforcement. To this end, we next examine modern use of radio policing to determine if these historical logics are reproduced in the contemporary policing of race and space in Chicago. Finally, we discuss how tools for collecting and archiving these radio transmissions might allow social scientists to study policing as it unfolds in real time. We conclude with a discussion of the significant tension between (a) ethical development of tools to study these data and (b) the capacity of these tools to aid in resisting current data colonialism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 164. Production of Knowledge Regimes: Experts, Political Authority, and Legitimation II