The Master’s Tools and a Mission: Using Community Control and Oversight Laws to Resist and Abolish Police Surveillance Technologies

The proliferation and use of technology by law enforcement is rooted in the hope that technological tools can improve policing. Improvement, however, is relative. Quantitative data and qualitative experience have proven the criminal legal system a site of racial injustice and rank brutality. Police are one of the principal instruments of those harms. For the communities who bear the brunt of policing and the other facets of the criminal system, law enforcement technologies only reify and exacerbate injustice. Surveillance technologies are of particular concern because they are disproportionately wielded against economically disadvantaged communities of color, infringe on privacy, and tend to operate under a veil of secrecy.