Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, and Democratic Control
Academic Article
Overview
Research
Identity
Additional Document Info
Other
View All
Overview
abstract
Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understandlet alone set limits onnew investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police power while remaining free of meaningful oversight. Second, shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine have expanded law enforcements ability to engage in surveillance relatively free of scrutiny by courts or by the public. The result is that modern policing is not highly visible to oversight institutions or the public and is becoming even less so. In light of these informational dynamics, transparency litigation has become a core technique for rendering obscure investigative practices visible and holding police accountable. These new lawsuits form a criminal procedure shadow docketthey resolve important questions about democratic governance of policing without deciding on the constitutionality of searches and seizures. This Article builds on the government secrecy literature to explore the significance of this shadow docket and the relationship between transparency obligations and constitutional limits on police action. In the absence of meaningful Fourth Amendment safeguards, transparency litigation makes policing practices increasingly visible to the public and democratic institutions in areas where constitutional criminal procedure today has minimal reach. These efforts to make policing visible bear important lessons for advocates and scholars of criminal procedure, criminal justice reform, and transparency itself.
