Review of Ferguson's The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement

Abstract

Technocratic reforms driven by advances in big data analytics are reconfiguring institutional norms, practices, and relationships in US domestic policing in profound ways. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement offers a comprehensive exposition of these trends and does so clearly, with an eye toward policy changes that might minimize the harms of big data policing on minority and disadvantaged communities. Ferguson is a legal scholar and professor, specializing in privacy, Fourth Amendment law, and policing technologies, and has written extensively on “predictive policing.” This background is evident in the expertise with which Ferguson situates big data applications within broader institutional patterns in policing. The downside is that the numerous examples through which the book’s arguments are developed are nearly all drawn from popular reporting or case law; as a result, there are perhaps too few connections with scholarly work on surveillance technologies outside of Fourth Amendment law and little theoretical contribution. Readers might be willing to forgive (or at least overlook) these gaps considering the book’s comprehensive and expositional ambitions and its targeted audience of practitioners in the world of domestic law enforcement, such as crime analysts, legal professionals, and police executives. At