Race Science and Surveillance

This paper aims to use a global perspective to address the relationship between race and the urban through an examination of the role of surveillance—a growing global phenomena—in contemporary western cities and its uses in creating and maintaining boundaries of race, particularly because surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups tend to be grounded in specific and bounded geographic locations. Using data from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop and Frisk program during the 2003-2013 period, this paper asks whether or not, strategies of state surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups, should be interpreted as a “new” type of scientific racism given the state’s desire to deploy and its hyper-reliance on technologies to fulfill its surveillance role.