prospect | During the last two decades, policing has become synonymous with surveillance:
the intense scrutiny of persons in public spaces. Poverty and the
symptoms of drug addiction signify criminality to the police in ways
similar to race. This surveillance targets the most vulnerable people in
American society: people of color and poor whites. L. experienced a
form of social oppression well known to people of color, targeted
because their presence is considered a threat to others, because of
their appearance, race, or presence in certain public spaces.
Mass incarceration in the U.S., is largely thought of as a problem
for black and brown communities. But this characterization risks masking
the pervasive injustice that befalls others who live in and around
those communities. The threat of surveillance has fallen
disproportionately on African Americans and Latinos for decades. But
during the era of mass incarceration, surveillance has increasingly
become further disconnected from any legitimate suspicion of criminal
behavior.
The new approach makes surveillance seem like a primary
responsibility of government. But this purported governmental
“responsibility” (which does not appear in the Constitution) is rapidly
overtaking the right to be free from surveillance, a protection that the
Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights guarantees.
We live in a country where the poor are often presumed guilty, since
they have failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This
“failure” has profound consequences. As Barton Gellman and Sam
Adler-Bell, a senior fellow and senior policy advocate at the Century
Foundation, noted in the 2017 Century Foundation report, “The Disparate Impact of Surveillance,”
the gaze of the state is “heaviest in communities already disadvantaged
by their poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status.”
