Who Looks Suspicious? Racialized Surveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood

Abstract

In recent decades, neighborhoods across the United States have begun to employ digital media to monitor their communities for outsiders who are seen as suspicious. Yet, little is known about these surveillance practices and their consequences at the individual and neighborhood levels. Such monitoring behaviors are important to analyze not only because of the ways that perceptions of criminal threat are often racialized but also because of the role that private citizens play in initiating contact between strangers and the police. Based on an analysis of e-mails submitted to a listserv in a liberal, predominantly white neighborhood from September 2008 through August 2009, this article explores how residents identify, discuss, and respond to people whom they define as suspicious. Findings show that most suspicious person e-mails focus on black men who are also more likely to be portrayed as unique threats to neighborhood safety. These results suggest that listserv surveillance practices foster racialized notions of criminal threat that both reinforce the boundaries of predominantly white neighborhoods and reproduce the perception of black men as criminals.