Racializing Surveillance: Flock Camera Deployment, Black Population Geography, and the Limits of the Homicide Rationale in Hampton Roads

Andrew F. Baird, Steven Keener and John Finn

No d6j3b_v2, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This study examines the racialized geography of automatic license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance in Hampton Roads, Virginia. We link court-unsealed Flock Safety camera locations to measures from the 2020–2024 American Community Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2022–2024 National Vital Statistics System. Population-adjusted negative binomial models with locality-clustered standard errors and Webb wild-cluster bootstrap p-values test associations with racial composition, poverty, age structure, homicide and overdose mortality, and Black/White neighborhood boundaries. Camera counts are consistently higher in areas with larger Black populations and those bordering substantially Blacker communities, net of all covariates. Homicide mortality is not positively associated with cameras in the fully controlled model, whereas overdose mortality is. These findings challenge race-neutral claims that ALPR cameras merely follow serious violence and support theories of racializing surveillance by showing how data-driven public-safety infrastructure can reproduce racial inequalities in surveillance exposure.

Date: 2026-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6a79fa035dc2307a326f6c89/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:d6j3b_v2

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/d6j3b_v2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().