Paper short abstract:

Surveillance is a sickness but also a form of care. Through an ethnographic analysis of the live crime-tracking app Citizen, this paper will examine the simultaneous pejorative and productive consequences of digital community surveillance in gentrifying neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.

Paper long abstract:

Citizen is a live crime and safety tracking app in New York City that uses AI to monitor police scanners for incidences that are relevant to “public safety”, whilst also utilizing user-recorded footage, as users near a crime, fire or accident, are encouraged to ‘go live’ and film unfolding events. Users comment, submit additional information and post expressive emojis as incidences unravel. In sharing information across a digital network, Citizen functions as both a form of social media and a peer-to-peer surveillance app. Through this lens, my ethnographic research investigates the impact of the digitization of crime and how this affects community relationships in increasingly gentrified neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.

Within the contemporary unwell world, surveillance technologies are often positioned as an omniscient and malevolent source of sickness, and not without cause. In the case of Citizen, in which surveillance is lateral and often racialized, fears are stoked about one’s community, bringing into question who does and doesn’t belong and, as such, bringing certain parts of the community together while further marginalizing others. However, digital technologies are inherently ambivalent and Citizen is no exception. My ethnographic research also uncovered innovative and unintended uses of Citizen, as a source of social inclusion and protest mobilization. This paper will address these tensions by exploring the delicate balance between care and surveillance, and the way in which anthropological enquiry is uniquely placed to unravel and examine such a relationship in the context of gentrifying neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.