Surveillance Isn’t Safety
How Communities are Re-imagining Safety In School
In an era of mass shootings, millions of dollars are spent each year on equipping elementary and high school campuses with military-grade surveillance. Companies often promise that such technologies will prevent the next school attack or help authorities respond faster when one occurs. But there is growing evidence that such efforts push marginalized students out of school and into the criminal legal system.
Recently, Rebekah Agwunobi, Chris Gilliard, and I hosted a workshop called “Surveillance Isn’t Safety,” where we discussed the ways that surveillance fuels the school-to-prison pipeline and how communities are fighting back. We invited four amazing community leaders — Clarence Okoh, Chinelo Dike, Marika Pfefferkorn and Aasim Shabazz — to share insights from their work re-imagining safety in the classroom and beyond.
Below is a paraphrased recap of the event. Timestamps are included to enable easy access to specific points in the conversation.
You can watch a recording of those conversations here and check out this annotated ppt for a brief overview on the state surveillance in schools.
How Surveillance Fuels the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Conversation between Chris Gilliard and Clarence Okoh
Chris is a community college professor and widely published critic and advocate for civil rights in tech. He is part of the inaugural cohort of Just Tech Fellows at the Social Science Research Council.
Clarence is a civil rights attorney and racial justice advocate whose work addresses the impact of mass criminalization and systemic divestment in Black communities, with a particular focus on Black youth and young adults.
Police Surveillance in Schools: The Case of Pasco County
Chris: Can you share some of the work you’ve been doing with a coalition of community members in Pasco County, Florida? (16:00)
Clarence explains that he is a member of a coalition that formed in late 2020/early 2021 after the Tampa Bay Times revealed that the Pasco County school district was sharing student data with the sheriff’s office in order to identify middle and high-school kids who were labeled as a “high risk” for committing future criminal activity. School officials shared sensitive information regarding students’ disciplinary records and histories of trauma, which were then fed into a previously undisclosed algorithm that was used to score every middle and high school student in the district. At least two thirds of the kids in Pasco County were labeled as either “high risk” or “off track” and were subsequently subjected to heightened surveillance by law enforcement.
“It’s the pervasive surveillance that’s happening with these young people.” Clarence explains, “Having officers come to their homes, knocking on their doors at night, following them — literally keeping intelligence files on middle school children.”
The Pasco County Coalition formed out of concern that such practices would be used to criminalize kids, pushing them out of the classroom and into the criminal punishment system.
Chris: Do you see the Pasco County example as an isolated case or representative of a broader trend? (20:00)
Clarence explains that every district in the country is likely to have some component of this surveillance apparatus in their schools, whether it’s a gunshot detection system, or automated license readers, etc. This is due in large part to the fact that the companies selling these technologies use aggressive marketing strategies and have grown adept at tapping into federal and state funding. For example, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies urged school officials to use emergency relief funds to procure facial recognition systems. Clarence also emphasizes that this surveillance technology goes hand in hand with more expansive police presence in schools.
“If you see police presence in schools, there is a strong likelihood that you’re also going to see these advanced surveillance technologies accompanying that presence.” (21:49)
Defining Carceral Technology
Chris: Your work centers on carceral technologies and school push-out of Black youth. How do you define carceral tech and how does such tech pose specific threats to Black youth?
Clarence defines carceral tech “as any kind of tool that allows law enforcement, or any other apparatus of the criminal legal system, to ensnare black and brown youth into contact with that system.” (22:20)
Beyond flashy new technologies like facial recognition, it also includes simple technologies that start out with good intentions. For example, Clarence argues, the early warning system in Pasco County might have been started with good intentions, as a way of identifying students who are at risk of dropping out of school and designing interventions to get those kids back on track.
“But something as innocent as that… can become a carceral technology the moment that you open it up and share it with law enforcement.” Clarence explains, “So we can kind of see carceral technologies as the tentacles of law enforcement, the tentacles of prisons, policing, jail. And they reach further and further into the lives of young people, whether that’s their physical lives in schools or in their communities or their digital lives.” (23:10)
Abolitionist Visions of Safety
Chris: Your work focuses on abolition. How do you define abolition and why do you center abolition, rather than harm mitigation or efficiency, in your work? (23:45)
Clarence situates his work within a long tradition of Black freedom struggle that originated during the antebellum period in the United States, when abolitionists rejected the notion that the U.S. economic system (based on the enslavement of Black people) could be made more benevolent or moral. It was only by understanding slavery as a system that inherently dehumanized and perpetuated violence at scale that earlier abolitionists were able to move towards a workable solution, which required nothing short of getting rid of the system altogether.
Clarence brings this thinking directly into his work on contemporary policing technologies in schools, which is anchored in building visions of school safety that don’t involve the police.
“What safety means to young people has nothing to do with police,” Clarence explains, “It has nothing to do with investments in carceral technologies. It has everything to do with investing in the basic needs that every young person has, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s access to mental healthcare, access to education, workforce, food… And unfortunately, the more that we invest in those carceral systems, the further that we siphon out resources that folks need to survive. And it creates this perpetual crisis that then calls for the enlarging of the carceral state to solve the problems that it helped create.” (26:00)
Chris: Who are the scholars and activists who have influenced your work? (27:30)
Clarence emphasizes that it’s not necessary to read a bunch of books in order to get started on this work.
“The older I get, the more I realize that the things that inform my work are much more attached to my lived experiences than they are in the academic or professional experiences,” Clarence explains. (28:00)
That being said, there are a few foundational works of scholarship which have been helpful in his work. These include:
Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Safiya Noble’s Algorithm’s of Oppression
Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackess
Students Fighting Back: A Conversation between Bekah Agwunobi and Chinelo Dike
Bekah is a senior at Columbia University, where she studies computer science. She’s been engaged in action-oriented research regarding algorithmic justice since she was fifteen years old.
Chinelo is one of the co-founders of the FBISD Equity Coalition, a student-led organization composed of former and current students in Fort Bend ISD (FBISD). This organization advocates for racial and social justice through political organizing, collecting experiences and connecting with third parties.
Origins of the FBISD Equity Coalition
Bekah: What drove you to start the FBISD Equity Coalition and what kinds of advocacy work does the coalition do? (32:40)
Chinelo explains that the coalition started in the summer of 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter protests. During this time, there were many students writing online about their experiences with racism in school. So she and her co-founder, Sameeha Rizvi, created a form for students from Fort Bend ISD to share their experiences. The response was overwhelming — stories from current students and alumni from across the district poured in.
“Despite our school district being very diverse, there’s still a lot of stuff that gets swept under the rug,” Chinelo explains, “So we started seeing people post about their experiences [online] and we were like ‘okay, let’s collect these experiences.’” (33:15)
During this time, she and Sameeha found out that their school district had been subject to a civil rights probe by the U.S. Department of Education, because the district disciplined black students at a much higher rate than their white peers. So the coalition formed and filed an open records request to learn more about the district’s disciplinary practices. After gathering the testimonies of several hundred students and alumni, they developed a set of five demands aimed at improving the experience of learning for all students in the district. Currently, the coalition is revising their demands as new laws have passed and more information has been learned. Their revised demands are expected to be made public after the 2022 fall semester ends.
Over the past couple of years, they’ve engaged with school officials to get their demands passed and hold school board officials accountable for the policies they support while in office.
Re-examining the Role of School Police
Bekah: One of the coalition’s demands calls for the district to re-examine its relationship with the police. What led you to prioritize this demand in your work?
Chinelo explains that many of the student experiences that they collected involved police officers in schools or inequitable disciplinary practices in the classroom. Students had shared concerning stories of the ways the district relied on school police to manage students during times when they were especially vulnerable, such as when they were going through a mental health crisis.
“We collected between 400–500 experiences and they just keep coming in…People were saying, especially in the predominantly black and Hispanic high schools in our district, that the police officers feel like wardens. Like, what are they doing exactly?” (36:59)
They also discovered that the district spends much more money on things like “security and monitoring” than they do on social or emotional support services. School counselors are in the schools, but they are more involved with scheduling and academic preparation than they were in mental health support. So in their demands, the Coalition called for the district to reallocate some of the money that they spend on security and monitoring for student support services.
Connecting History to Present-day Struggles
Bekah: Can you tell us a bit about the history and legacy of the carceral state in your school district? (38:05).
Chinelo mentions that in 2018 the school district discovered a mass grave site while they were breaking ground on a new technical training center. The site held the bodies of ninety-five African Americans who died under the convict labor leasing system, more than one hundred years ago. As it turns out, Fort Bend County has an extensive history of convict labor leasing, but this history has been erased from living memory. For example, Chinelo was never taught about convict leasing in her school. So another one of the Coalition’s demands has been to integrate this history back into their school curriculum.
“It’s wild that I learned that as a senior in high school, but they didn’t ever really mention it.” Chinelo explains, “I learned it more in college… Why aren’t we learning about this in our schools and why does it take them finding this site for us to talk about it?” (39:10)
Bekah: Is there anything else that you’ve learned from the student testimonials about the district’s disparate discipline practices? (39:50)
Chinelo says that the coalition noticed significant variations in the ways students have been treated across the different schools in the district. For example, she attended a predominantly black and Latinx middle school, where they had structured seating everyday, which meant that students were assigned seats during lunch hours and were unable to socialize with their friends because they were considered “too rowdy.” However, in Sameeha’s school (which was predominantly white and Asian) the students rarely had structured seating.
Bekah: As a student and alumni-led coalition, what challenges have you faced in organizing for equity in the classroom?
Chinelo says that students are involved with a lot of school activities and other responsibilities. It can be tough to balance school work and jobs with organizing. Student activism tends to come in waves and much of the work of the Coalition is about trying to maintain the momentum of those waves over time.
Re-imagining Safety in Schools: A conversation between Chelsea Barabas, Marika Pfefferkorn and Aasim Shabazz.
Chelsea is a PhD candidate at MIT, where she studies a wide range of issues related to the ways technology becomes a battleground for transformational social change.
Marika is the co-founder of the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance and Executive Director of The Midwest Center for School Transformation, where she leads youth programming, community participatory research, advocacy, and the No Data about Us Without Us Institute. Marika has cofounded and/or led the Minnesota Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition, the Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm Coalition, the Education for Liberation Minnesota Chapter, and the newly launched No Criminalizing Tech in Education (NOTICE) National Coalition.
Aasim is a vision-driven technologist and President & Co-founder of Twin Cities Innovation Alliance (TCIA), a public interest community and technology ecosystem enabler for diverse communities, centered on cultivating the spaces for meaningful contributions, change-making, and relationship-building.
Fighting the “Cradle-to-prison Algorithm”
Chelsea: Can you tell us about the Coalition to Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm in Ramsey County? What sparked the formation of that coalition and what are some lessons learned from this work?
Marika explains that in Ramsey County the school district entered into an agreement to share school discipline data with police in order to determine which students were most “at risk” of engaging in criminal activity. This agreement was signed less than six months after a report from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights had identified the district as having serious racial disparities in the way it disciplined students.
“So you’re using a biased framework to identify who is at-risk…” Marika explains, “This is so much bigger than the school to prison pipeline, because literally what they’re proposing is to take data for youth and their families from before they’re born to the end of life. It doesn’t just impact the students they’re collecting data on, it’s impacting the families.” (46:00)
So community advocates for juvenile justice and educational equity forged a coalition to roll back this work. The coalition was successful — in 2018 they got the district dissolve their data sharing agreement.
Chelsea: How has that work fed into your latest effort, the No Criminalizing Tech in Ed National Coalition (NOTICE)?
Marika explains that they’d initially started looking for other communities who were being impacted in the same way, but that it was hard to find others who had identified similar challenges.
“A lot of the work that was being done was by academics, institutions, and others and it didn’t really reflect the lived experiences of communities,” Marika explains. (47:45)
As a result, policymakers and legislators didn’t really believe that these technologies were having an adverse impact on marginalized communities. She and Clarence wanted to start collecting these stories and deepen their engagement with impacted communities.
As part of that work they are hosting a summit on Oct. 15th called No Criminalizing Tech in Ed, where impacted communities can share stories and build a collective timeline that demonstrates how this work has been showing up in different places. They’ll then spend time identifying solutions, which they can disseminate into a toolkit to share more broadly.
Mobilizing Against “Data Entrapment”
Aasim explains that there is often a point of entry gap for people when they start conversations about surveillance in schools.
“We had to look and say, ‘where’s the point of entry for most of us…’” Aasim explains, “When are you starting to come in contact with the system of biases, with the data, that is already being used to entrap you and to marginalize you and put you in box that you don’t even realize you’re in?” (49:50)
Aasim and Marika have organized a program called Data 4 Public Good, which aims to de-mystify these processes and talk about issues of “data entrapment” in accessible ways. They’ve worked with Dr. Ruha Benjamin and Cierra Robson at the Just Data Lab in order to develop a set of resources for having these kinds of conversations.
Chelsea: In a lot of places, there isn’t much disclosure around data sharing and surveillance in schools — what’s the best point of entry you’ve found to raise awareness about these practices? (52:30)
Marika says that county commissioners initially tried to shut down important conversations they were raising by saying that their communities were not smart enough to understand the real issues related to data sharing and surveillance. So TCIA launched the “No Data About Us Without Us” Fellowship and Institute, which equipped community members with the things they needed to launch a campaign around these issues in their neighborhoods.
For example, participants from Framington hosted El Dia de La Data, where they recruited community members at soccer games, the fresh market, etc. to develop a cohort of ambassadors who could ask questions and advocate with school officials moving forward. In the North Side community of Minneapolis, participants successfully advocated for the creation of a data advisory board, which now reviews what the school district has been collecting, how it’s being used, who’s benefited, etc. (55:30).
Surveillance Isn’t Inevitable
Chelsea: I’ve heard you say/write on numerous occasions that “surveillance isn’t inevitable.” Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by that? What are exercises that you engage in in order to stoke people’s creative capacity to imagine alternatives to surveillance? (1:00:50)
At a workshop at the University of Minnesota (The Black Think Tank), they asked people to imagine a world without surveillance. It was a challenging exercise.
As Aasim explains, “If you cannot imagine an alternative to what you’re in, you’re doomed to stay in that path and others will continue to have a narrative that serves their best interests in controlling you, when you don’t have the imagination of your own.”
So they are launching the Digital Justice Ideathon on September 24th and 25th, which will bring together students and community members to go thru a design process that challenges the idea that we need surveillance to keep kids safe. Participants will come up with a series of alternatives for creating safety in school, which they will then pitch to a panel of judges from the community. TCIA will provide some seed funding to put those ideas into action.
“Innovation is about moving away those boundaries and being able to experiment,” Aasim explains, “Being willing to engage with others and give them a voice at the table. And not just a voice, but to have them act on it.” (1:05:30)
Penalizing Difference
Chris: What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding in the broader conversation about school surveillance and security. How would you reframe it?
Aasim says that people often say that if students are well behaved, then they don’t need to worry about being surveilled. That’s an oversimplification — what we should be thinking about how we can create space for young people to learn from their mistakes and build a system of trust around how sensitive data is being used. (1:09:30)
Marika says that many families think this way because they don’t recognize what exactly is being shared. There’s a false sense of security, because people don’t realize the kinds of things that might be revealed through, for example, a classroom assignment.)
Chinelo says that students are not always aware of how certain data can set off a series of unexpected actions from school officials. For example, in Fort Bend ISD, if a student checks out a book related to LGBTQ issues, their parents will be alerted. (1:12:40)
Aasim says that we don’t realize that our constitutional rights are being eroded and that it’s coming from multiple angles — if you can get flagged for checking out a book, that can have a serious chilling effect. (1:13:15)
Clarence emphasizes that a student’s identity can be found out in their search history — so much information can be gathered by the State via data brokers and school issued devices. On top of that, we are living in a time of significant rights retrenchment — there’s growing criminalization of various life activities. A student student’s web search history could be used to prosecute them for criminal intent if they recently looked up abortion services online, for example. (1:14:46)
Aasim says that you can’t do research today on many topics without throwing up a red flag — that stifles growth and learning. “The art of being different is being penalized…” he says, “if you don’t align to the norms of small groups who live off of fear, they will stifle the whole of us.” (1:16:40)
Embracing a Bold Vision for the Future
Audience Question: Can anyone speak to attempts to organize with teachers and also the tensions about critiquing schools in this moment when there are such intense attacks on public education?
Bekah says that she appreciates the ways that reproductive rights have been linked with the issue of surveillance, because many young people are activated on the issue of reproductive rights. “If you actively speak to what students are interested in and actively care about…then we really can have important dialogues across different age groups on campus.” (1:19:40)
Clarence mentions that they have a number of teacher advocates who have been part of the Pasco coalition from day one. But they have seen retaliation from the district against teachers who speak out. They have tried to ensure that their legal organizations are present and engaged to help them to navigate these tricky dynamics. (1:21:30)
Chinelo says that the FBISD Equity Coalition has also tried reaching out to teachers, but that many are scared of losing their jobs. They’ve had some teachers follow the coalition on their personal accounts, but not their FBISD accounts. It’s tough to know how to engage them without them putting them at risk. (1:23:30)
Aasim urges us all to move past fears of retaliation and isolation, to embrace a bold and optimistic for the future: “Injustice will invariably dominate the day if individuals are afraid to speak out…we have to continue to cast a nobler vision of what the present and the future holds for us… The call to action is now.” (1:25:00)
This workshop was hosted by SIS, a coalition of researchers, organizers, and high schoolers mobilizing to defund surveillance in schools and promote equitable initiatives that actually keep kids safe. To learn more, email us at surveillanceisntsafety@gmail.com
