Flock on campus: university police as appendages of a national policing apparatus

Abstract

Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system, which indiscriminately exposes millions of people to fine-grained tracking of their movements over time. Drawing on open-records requests filed with US public universities and colleges, this article shows how campus police departments’ use of the Flock system transforms local communities into targets for radical conservative policing agendas. We found that at least 150 institutions of higher education–including many small colleges and community colleges–are using Flock’s surveillance network. We also found that many campus police departments have facilitated immigration-related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so. The article offers a corrective to existing theories of nodal policing by highlighting the risks of state anchoring when the state is the perpetrator of violence upon its own population. We argue that Flock ushers in a stealth form of nodal policing that transforms campus police departments into appendages of a national policing apparatus.