Dear (White) Academia: Abandon “Deep Complicity” with Racist Policing
The still-dominant models of doing social research reinforce the white supremacist status quo and take for granted the legitimacy of militarized, racist state power. But better models do exist that involve deep partnership and accountability with communities organizing for survival and justice.
White People for Black Lives (WP4BL) endorses and supports the incisive research and community organizing of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in its quest to understand, challenge, and educate the public about the racist, classist, and gendered character of policing and surveillance in Los Angeles.
The work of Stop LAPD Spying reminds us that, as the saying goes, “When we fight, we win!” Their legal, research, and organizing efforts have led to the cancellation of two predictive policing programs within a year of one another. In April 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was forced to cancel “Operation LASER” (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) and their Chronic Offender program, after Stop LAPD Spying won a California public records lawsuit against the LAPD demanding access to the documents on “LASER.” The records revealed an extensive apparatus of surveillance made up of “LASER Zones” and smaller hotspots called “Anchor Points,” which enabled the city attorney to target areas of the city for eviction and displacement. Also exposed was the LAPD’s use of social network analysis in stalking and profiling people as supposed “chronic offenders” — analyses rooted in gendered racism and classism, dressed up as algorithms.
While the Stop LAPD Spying coalition awaited the public information request’s fulfillment, members produced the 2018 report, Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles, to raise community consciousness about the “multiple tentacles of state violence … including … the deep complicity of academia, corporate profit, and the deadly impact and trauma of programs such as Predictive Policing on our communities.”
However, bullets fired by police had already hit bodies — especially in or near the “LASER Zones” imagined by this racist surveillance program. Jesse Romero, Richard Risher, Kenny Watkins, Keith Bursey, Daniel Perez, Grechario Mack, and Robert Diaz were all killed by police in such zones.
Say their names.
Jesse Romero.
Richard Risher.
Kenny Watkins.
Keith Bursey.
Daniel Perez.
Grechario Mack.
Robert Diaz.
In April 2020, Stop LAPD Spying’s pressure led to LAPD’s shutdown of a second predictive policing program, PredPol, a for-profit algorithm-based surveillance tool created by UCLA anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham — a project which raises serious concerns about the intersections of public university research and the interests of private, profit-driven projects of surveillance, which rest on foundations of gendered racism and classism. Many scholars agree that PredPol is both ethically and methodologically flawed, and 450 said so in a letter to the Los Angeles Police Commission.
The Brantingham/PredPol example is an egregious case of how racial capitalism infects contemporary academia — with deadly consequences for Black and Brown communities. And yet, WP4BL knows that milder, kinder, and more “liberal” examples of research on “biased surveillance” and “police reform” are even more pervasive in academia. In many cases, such projects result from researchers embedding themselves in police departments, immersing themselves in data science, applying social theories and methods forged within white knowledge traditions, and in little or no way making themselves accountable to communities who are directly targeted by the racist police and surveillance state — what Stop LAPD Spying calls the “white gaze of the Stalker State.”
For example, sociologist Sarah Brayne embedded herself with the most murderous police department in the nation (the LAPD), and after concluding her research, said this in a CBC News report about predictive policing: “I think it’s too early to say if it does lead to more effective policing, but I think it has the potential to, yes. Because there is the efficiency aspect of it where if you’re allocating resources to where crime is actually occurring rather than, sort of, biased perceptions of where crime is occurring, that’s a good thing.” How might she have come to more accurate conclusions had she linked up with Stop LAPD Spying as deeply as she did with the LAPD, and with the communities targeted and killed within “LASER Zones”? What might the loved ones of Jesse Romero, Richard Risher, Kenny Watkins, Keith Bursey, Daniel Perez, Grechario Mack, or Robert Diaz have shared about the effects of predictive policing on their lives, had she interviewed them? In a similar example, law professor Andrew Ferguson has written a book about race and police surveillance, and yet has dedicated his book, in part, to police! We cannot help but to argue that such white scholars are building their careers on liberal reformist studies of irredeemably violent systems, and we are calling on white scholars to do better. Black Lives Matter is not a mere slogan. For white folks, it is a call to real accountability.
At this time in history, many institutions are being called upon to reckon with their white supremacist foundations, histories, and ongoing realities. Universities have long upheld structures of racism and imperialism, and this is reflected in the often extractive, colonial ways faculty conduct research — sometimes with little accountability toward oppressed communities for whom their studies are purported to benefit. This is also reflected in the composition of faculty, which is overrepresented by white, middle class people. You need only spend a few minutes reading posts with the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory on Twitter to understand how white supremacy culture pervades academia.
The still-dominant models of doing social research reinforce the white supremacist status quo and take for granted the legitimacy of militarized, racist state power. But better models do exist that involve deep partnership and accountability with communities organizing for survival and justice. We encourage white members of academia to challenge white supremacy in the profession, including within cultures of research and publishing. Discard the racist and individualist fetishization of “intelligence.” Abandon the hierarchical research models and the too limited forms of “research ethics” that predominate across disciplinary canons. Pursue models of research justice. Decolonizing and dismantling white supremacy in the academy is not possible until researchers who investigate the racist police-, prison- and military-industrial complexes radically transform how, and for whom, we do research. Building academic careers off the trauma and oppression of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color has persisted too long, and it’s time white researchers rethink who we partner with, and to whom we are accountable. Let’s align our allegiances and place our skills in service to movements challenging racist state surveillance and terror, like the one led by Stop LAPD Spying.
The topic of “racial justice” is trending right now. We are thrilled that white people are buying more antiracism books than ever before and figuring out how to become antiracists, how to unlearn and rethink, and how to imagine the future of policing — or better yet in our view, its hasty descent into obsolescence. We challenge white people to think about how white supremacy functions in our workplaces. And, because academia is immersed in racial capitalism, professors earn tenure, build careers, and become known by publishing original research often through the colonial model of extraction — of data, artifacts, people’s stories and unique cultures — on which academia was built. Just as the pandemic has been lucrative for billionaires, the Black Lives Matter-led uprising we are currently engaged in has been really great for the racial justice knowledge industry.
It’s on white academics to spend this time reflecting on how to discard the politics of self-promotion and instead become traitors to white supremacy, in the university and in the streets.
This article is written by White People 4 Black Lives (WP4BL). WP4BL is a white anti-racist collective and activist project of the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere (AWARE-LA) and operates within a national network of white anti-racists called Showing Up for Racial Justice. WP4BL is rooted in acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Los Angeles. Visit www.awarela.org and follow us @wp4bl.
