Effective Surveillance That “Doesn’t Work”: Inferences and Social Control in New York City Public Housing

Abstract

In New York City, public housing residents are subject to constant, concentrated electronic surveillance that is beset by inequalities in application and the potential for adverse outcomes. In the literature, there is little insight into either the process by which such systems function or the impacts of this intensified exposure. This article explores, in particular, the role of inference in determining the effectiveness of surveillance. Through an analysis of qualitative data gathered through interviews with public housing residents, this article argues that surveillance, notwithstanding its actual function, is associated with powerful inferences about its functional possibilities. Findings address a source of endogeneity in existing surveillance-related studies, demonstrating how inferences about electronic surveillance notwithstanding their actual surveillant functionality may be related to the use of avoidance practices.

There are public housing developments all over the five boroughs of New York City (NYC). These buildings are known for their somewhat blocky and institutional design, and they often come with community centers and signs announcing affiliation with the public housing system. However, far more starkly, these developments are also often marked by a variety of objects associated with surveillance. These include conspicuous high-wattage commercial job-site lights, ¹ surveillance cameras, signs detailing surveillance effectiveness and presence, and moveable police surveillance towers, which make up most of the visible part of a surveillance infrastructure deployed within NYC public housing.

This article explores this surveillance primarily in terms of (1) a disciplining effect that surveillance produces among public housing residents through inferences made about the functional risk of surveillance objects; (2) a disciplining effect that can be produced even when it is either thought, assumed, or suspected that surveillance objects do not work or are ineffective; and (3) whether inferences made in relation to surveillance objects may contribute to avoidance practices. In prioritizing an exploration of inference in this study and discordant views about surveillance, a tool through which we may dig deeper into the mechanics of surveillance emerges (Marx 2016).

An inference is a conclusion drawn on the basis of evidence and reasoning around the data to which one has access. Public housing in NYC is historically and at the time of this study part of a geography of mass incarceration and overpolicing and oversurveillance. For public housing residents, defining and acting according to the norms of police action, rule compliance, and risk avoidance exist at the axis of their access to housing. Thus, inferences made by residents on how surveillance works hinge on a risk assessment inferred from personal, historical, and community experience with policing and reflects the high stakes of maintaining their access to housing. Functionally, for residents, surveillance “works” based on a set of inferences about the possibilities of surveillant function that may or may not track the “actual” possibilities of social control associated with government surveillance.

Recent articles on surveillance of residential spaces discuss surveillance primarily in terms of in-person (not electronic) access gained to individuals or families, for example, following allegations of child abuse and neglect (Drake, Jonson-Reid, and Kim 2017; Edwards 2016; Eubanks 2018; Fong 2020; Gilliom 2001; Hughes 2019; Jackson 2012; Michalsen 2019; Woodward 2021), through social welfare programs attuned to specific criteria such as homelessness programs (Hennigan 2016), in urban contexts (Gilliom 2001; Ziv 2017), medicalized surveillance of the body (French and Monahan 2020; Reich 2019), through crisis situations (Boersma and Fonio 2019), or prisoner reentry programs (Prior 2020; Seim and Harding 2020). Additionally, a recent body of scholarship describes in particular the experience of surveillance in the context of subsidized or public housing at the community level (Blokland 2020; Eubanks 2018; Hughes 2020; Kozubaev et al. 2019; Miller and Alexander 2016; Monahan 2010).

Contributing to this timely literature, this article focuses in particular on electronic residential surveillance, exploring how electronic surveillance functions within a specific type of residential space: public housing. Public housing for the purposes of this article is housing that is owned by a government and leased to individuals because they meet a low-income threshold that allows them to qualify for a housing benefit. As in NYC, this housing is most typically built in large blocks or developments, heavily concentrating low-income families and individuals and people of color.

There are other types of government subsidized housing, such as that referred to as Section 8 or the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) housing, of which an umbrella of funding types exist, but were not the subject of this study. NYC’s public housing, as that in much of the country, facing funding shortfalls and critical maintenance needs, is currently in the process of a complex shift whereby private landlords will manage some public housing. The divide between HCVP and non-HCVP housing and between purely “public” housing and public/private housing is increasingly blurred as more cities orchestrated their housing programs to take advantage of federal housing dollars and other complex financial incentives. However, the concentrated blocks of housing like those studied here most often remain even after funding programs shift. As well, as a part of this shift, many cities have taken advantage of grants specifically earmarked for the purchase of surveillance equipment that intensively surveils housing residents. Thus, the central dynamic explored in this article is increasingly common across the United States because the use of surveillance in public housing and other highly concentrated subsidized housing has increased alongside funding availability.

Although it is generally accepted that the dynamics of surveillance, both electronic and not, must be understood as existing within an assemblage of different modalities of surveillance, the use of electronic surveillance in the residential context presents possibilities of imposition into personal privacy that are still being explored. Privacy is a commonly understood yet complex concept and can be thought of as freedom from public attention, the ability to be free of interference and intrusion, the experience of being in the “back stage” (Goffman 2008), the ability to associate freely, or in terms of legal or rights-based conceptions. Surveillance, a kind of close watching, is a concept that at times can have various meanings and is at times thought to be at odds with privacy. The surveillance discussed here, unless explicitly stated otherwise, is that which is projected from the “top down,” that is not, for example, sousveillance or other types of surveillance that residents may be able to impose on one another. Rather, the surveillance referenced in this article refers to the real and inferred capabilities of government-owned and -operated electronic surveillance equipment that is visible in and around public housing developments in NYC.

Marx (2016) suggests the question that should generally animate a study of surveillance is: What concepts are needed to capture the fundamental surveillance structures and processes across diverse tools and settings in order to make better comparative statements (whether across tools, institutions or countries)? In doing so, implications for social life can be understood. This article outlines a social process of inference whereby surveillance penetrates personal life, adding to an existing literature about the processes by which surveillance is brought into the residential sphere.

Literature Review

The first NYC housing development was completed in 1935. Public housing in NYC was also primarily White until the 1950s, when tenancy was opened up to a very “select” group of Black and Latinx families. Although New York State was one of the first jurisdictions to forbid racial discrimination in public housing as a matter of law, explicit discrimination against its lowest income residents continued through 1968, before which it prohibited residents on welfare and screened potential residents using a list of moral factors, including “alcoholism, irregular work history, single motherhood and lack of furniture” (Ferre-Sadurni 2018).

Explicit housing discrimination remained the norm until the mid-1960s, when social justice groups fought for housing to be more accessible (Owens 2020). The percentage of families in public housing on public assistance had doubled by the early 1970s and 1980s, and crime, drugs, and vandalism also afflicted public housing developments (Ferre-Sadurni 2018). Nevertheless, public housing became a beacon of consistency as the city weathered an economic downturn that contributed to the deterioration of several NYC neighborhoods (Ferre-Sadurni 2018; Owens 2020).

In the 1980s, NYC agreed to provide housing to any homeless individual seeking lodging as part of a larger, national program to address the problem of homelessness. Because the most vulnerable families were increasingly the recipients of public housing and fewer went to lower-middle-class families, public housing concentrated the relatively low income or jobless (Owens 2020).

To redevelop neighborhoods left crumbling in the previous decade, in 1985, the NYC government planned to invest billions on programs to rehabilitate housing for the middle class. Instead, the initiative led to developments targeting the middle class. Much of the city’s abandoned property was given to developers for free or at low cost vis-à-vis construction subsidies for vacant properties, among other measures. The initiative only further stratified housing in NYC: Middle-class residents were able to access private, new construction, and public housing developments became one of the only resources for those struggling with drug dependency, mental illness, and homelessness (Owens 2020). Throughout, disinvestment left the NYC public housing system in disorder and in need of repair.

More recent efforts to revitalize and make public housing safer and to remediate the unsatisfactory relationship between police and public housing led to the installment of government-owned security cameras and other types of surveillance objects and initiatives in partnership between the city’s public housing administrative agency (NYCHA) and the New York Police Department (NYPD). Mostly unmonitored, these cameras do not prevent crime, and footage is available by request for court and administrative proceedings through a simple electronic form.

Studies of public housing in other cities have also shown that authorities use surveillance technology to evict public housing tenants and that the breadth and depth of surveillance to which residents are subject is vastly greater compared to individuals who do not live in public housing. One survey of surveillance in various public housing locations found that whereas NYC had 1 camera per 19 residents, and others, such as Rolette, North Dakota, had up to 1.1 per 1 public housing resident, a concentration greater than found in the surveillance system in the Rikers Island prison (MacMillan 2023). A study of public housing residents in Steubenville, Ohio, showed that they were about 25 times more likely to be observed in their daily routines by publicly owned cameras than other residents were (MacMillan 2023).

Residents in public housing developments and concentrated subsidized housing across the United States are subject to intensive surveillance, like those in this study. Surveillance tools are a foremost investment in public housing, extolled as being in the best interest of residents for the purposes of crime prevention. However, as many public housing developments have been reorganized to take increasing advantage of federal funding and have been granted federal crime-fighting grants meant to help increase safety, surveillance has been used increasingly to fine and evict residents for small infractions in public housing developments (MacMillan 2023). Like the NYC residents interviewed for this study, public housing residents in other cities are often ambivalent about surveillance (MacMillan 2023). On one hand, they are happy about the increased surveillance because it helps to assuage their worries about crime (MacMillan 2023). On the other hand, many complain that the surveillance systems “don’t work” because crime is not prevented and surveillance is instead used to punish residents (MacMillan 2023). This ambivalence, present across several locations with surveillance in public or subsidized housing and this study, is key to understanding the inferences that are created concerning surveillance, which generate surveillance effectiveness, and which contribute to its capacity for effecting certain types of social control.

Much of the literature on surveillance and poverty regulating regimes focuses on surveillance, including electronic and nonelectronic, from service-based institutions such as schools, hospitals, or child welfare organizations. It is well established in the literature that electronic and nonelectronic surveillance create a linked disciplining assembly of surveillance that has particular implications for underresourced urban communities and individuals (Brayne 2014; Fong 2020; Garland 2002; Turney and Wakefield 2019). For those residents of public housing, it is the case that the assembly extends to residents by virtue of the institutional nature of public housing (Hughes 2020). However, the mechanism of disciplining and social control, which is unique in a residential context associated with intimate, private spaces, is not fully understood (Fong 2020), especially in terms of electronic surveillance.

Previous research has shown that individuals under heightened surveillance, specifically, parolees subject to heightened punitive structures, avoid surveilling institutions such as hospitals and schools (Brayne 2014; Goffman 2014). As well, the recipients of public housing are subject to a heightened context of surveillance at the nexus of public housing residency. Residents are subject to a myriad of rules that are experienced as arbitrary and unpredictable and produce anxiety about maintaining access to public housing. This institutional context heightens a sense of being “watched” and may lead to outcomes involving avoidance, meaning that avoidance may be more widely practiced.

Non-Latinx Black New Yorkers and Latinx New Yorkers are overrepresented in public housing both in terms of percentage of population of New York generally and percentage of New Yorkers living with incomes under the poverty line. In terms of the same, White and Asian New Yorkers are underrepresented in public housing. Browne (2015) demonstrates in the book Dark Matters that surveillance itself is constructed as a racist intervention informed by previous racialized methods of policing and laws dating back to slavery. The use of surveillance is also part and parcel of more contemporary contexts of racialized policing and distrust of urban poor and may act as a “durable barrier to social inclusion” for those living within public housing (Monahan 2010:81). Monahan (2010) notes the use of surveillance to contain public housing residents and that they are treated paternalistically and perhaps as criminal suspects themselves. Furthermore, the boundaries around public housing created by surveillance are part of a larger phenomenon whereby the state participates in the creation of boundaries around race. Byfield (2019) argues that surveillance of racial and ethnic minorities should be considered as a new type of scientific racism given hyper-reliance on both data and technology and its disparate effects.

In relation to the surveillance objects, residents make inferences about a world of possibilities in the function of those objects even when they simultaneously perceive them not to work well or to be dysfunctional. Inferences are made on the basis of evidence, individual and communal experience, and reason and emerges through a complex interaction between agency and environment, place and history. This article demonstrates that inference is key in understanding the breadth and depth of the disciplinary function of surveillance in public housing.

Surveillance has been associated with an intensification of disciplining and social control within already heavily policed communities, where residents note about the NYPD, for example, that they “see the police as an ‘occupying force’ or believe that they are constantly under siege by the NYPD. This feeling of being ‘occupied’ by the NYPD is reinforced by the presence of police in the homes and schools of young people of color” (Belen 2018:345)

Surveillance is unique in that it is always theoretically on: It has a gaze that is ubiquitous, and any data gathered may be perpetually held for future use (Côté-Boucher 2017; Tazzioli 2018). It is well documented in the literature that electronic surveillance methods used in public housing developments for comprehensive crime control and rehabilitation play a role in further entrenching social inequality through the introduction of harms such as increased contact with the criminal justice system (Blokland 2020; Hughes 2020). NYC public housing is delineated by surveillance-related objects that mark it as a heavily watched space. Observation of public housing environments revealed highly conspicuous surveillance-related objects that were different. For example, job-site lights marked “NYPD,” which are better suited to construction sites instead of their repurposed function of providing visibility in domestic spaces, were distributed across public housing yards and sidewalks. An NYC journalist found that these lights shine through the night hours with enough wattage to render public housing yards and common spaces as lit stadiums or prison yards (Chiel 2016). The surveillance camera snapshot photos of individuals banned from public housing grounds are featured on xeroxed pages tacked on community bulletin boards. Additional signs announce that police surveillance is present. The police commonly use moveable towers that can be extended for a bird’s-eye view to gather data near—and within—public housing complexes.

For certain, in the world of surveillance, the visible objects of electronic surveillance are like the tip of the iceberg, with invisible data-gathering capabilities existing beyond what can be seen. In addition to the particular kinds of surveillance objects that are made visible in the context of public housing, investigative journalists and public advocacy organizations have discovered devices like ShotSpotter, which records and transmits the sound of gunfire, “Stingrays” (cell phone locators), automatic license plate readers, mobile “X-ray” vans that can peer through clothing and walls, automated facial recognition programs and other software, and information-sharing networks like the $40 million Domain Awareness System, which combines information from police records and databases (Bates 2017; Coscarelli 2012; Friedersdorf 2015; Garvie and Bedoya 2018; Hirose 2016; Price 2017). Police also survey social media and have made several arrests based on tenuous online connections between residents, which again contributes to the experience of being watched (Belen 2018). Notwithstanding these capabilities, the presence of visible surveillance objects have particular disciplining capabilities that are inferred by residents whether they are functional or not.

In contrast to less visible or covert surveillance technologies, the cameras and other surveillance objects in public housing are highly visible tools of surveillance. Although cameras or job-site lights could ostensibly be integrated into architecture, they are uniformly placed conspicuously. These visible surveillance objects produce a set of inferences among residents who are the subjects of this surveillance and according to which residents conduct their social lives. Predominant studies of surveillance insufficiently address the existence and role of such inferences (Berry 2019).

There is a “dynamic interplay” between the agency of the resident to freely associate and the structure of surveillance that the resident confronts (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Similarly to de Certeau’s (1984) “tactics of resistance” or Tilly’s (1986) “repertoires of contention,” the inferences made about surveillance in public housing are themselves transformative. Foucault (1995) as well emphasizes that power may be confronted in the micro-interactions of everyday life, such as the ones residents experience in their day-to-day experience with surveillance.

Inference regarding the potential of risk and punishment is central to studies of the disciplinary function of the state and resulting social control, although sociological studies of surveillance rarely acknowledge it, focusing primarily on the disparate applications of surveillance (i.e., certain geographic areas and populations are more surveilled), the disparate outcomes of surveillance (i.e., increased contact with the criminal justice system), the functional problems of surveillance (i.e., it may lead to systems avoidance), or the super-structural mechanism of surveillance (i.e., the strength, evolution, or status of the surveillant assemblage). Each of these kinds of studies are integral to explaining the sociological meaning of surveillance and how surveillance contributes to inequality.

However, returning to a foundational theory of inference as integral to social disciplining through surveillance, the role of inference within the contemporary, technological structures of surveillance remains relevant. In Foucault’s (1995) analysis of Bentham’s panopticon, prisoners are disciplined through a mode of surveillance made ubiquitous and ever-present precisely because the surveilling gaze was always a possibility and never a certainty at any given moment. In Bentham’s plans, subjects were always fully visible to prison authorities whenever the latter wished, even though all prisoners could not always be seen. Because each individual prisoner could never know whether he was being observed at any given present point in time, the prisoners must make an inference that they could be and behave accordingly. Thus, the actual disciplining function of the Panopticon— “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1995:201)—relied on the inference of prisoners, where the inferential conclusion was the mechanism whereby the contingent gaze of prison authorities was internalized as ever-present This vision of disciplinary authority that “the gaze is alert everywhere” succeeds in disciplining because of the ever-present possibility of the disciplining gaze without necessitating its actual realization on any given moment. Foucault showed that this gaze also extended to other institutional contexts, such as schools or hospitals. In this article, I show that the gaze is alert in public housing, and the inferences made about surveillance reflect internalized possibilities about the disciplinary function of surveillance.

Public housing is not a closed institution; it does not have the hard boundaries of a hospital, school, or prison, for example. Yet even with the porous boundaries of public housing, surveillance has a disciplining authority made through inferences about the possibilities of its function. It is generally accepted that the disciplining authority of surveillance extends beyond closed institutions (Brayne 2014). For Brayne (2014), this meant that parolees from prison experienced the force of governmental authority as existing even in their everyday life, similarly to that experienced in a “closed” institution, such as prison.

This is important because public housing residents do not live in closed institutions but in fluid residential spaces in which they may exercise a great deal of agency, at least compared to prisoners. Understanding of the process by which the disciplinary authority of surveillance is extended beyond closed spaces and into open-ended, private, residential spaces—in which a great deal of agency may be exercised and a great deal of privacy is experienced—remains in flux (Marx 2016). In part, it is the inference of the individual subject to the assemblage that legitimizes and make real disciplining possibilities. Overwhelmed by disciplinary realities, disciplinary inference toward surveillance objects becomes a functional part of surveillance.

Foucault’s (1995:302–303) study of the technologies and mechanisms of surveillance showed that “carceral continuity and the fusion of the prison-form make it possible to legalize, or in any case to legitimate disciplinary power, which thus avoids any element of excess or abuse it may entail.” The entailment was clear: Legality and technology are “homogenized,” “circulating the same calculated, mechanical and discrete methods from one to the other,” carrying out “that great ‘economy’ of power” (Foucault 1995:302–303). Despite the nuance and sophistication of Foucault’s analyses, Haggerty and Ericson (2000:607) find fault in his “curious silence” and failure to “directly engage contemporary developments in surveillance technology,” citing that the fundamental function of an assemblage of surveillance focused on networked data was not under his contemplation. ² In doing so, a conception of the surveillant assemblage as linked and digitized became dominant within many sociological studies of surveillance. One of the primary outcomes of this differentiation between older and contemporary surveillance technologies was to produce a cleavage in the sociological literature on surveillance that discounts and at times overlooks the centrality of context as a determinant of the extent and efficacy of the internalization of discipline. Others note that Foucault’s groundbreaking analysis in the 1970s directly speaks neither to the “multiplicity and fluidity” of surveillance nor the fact that surveillance can serve individual and institutional needs (Marx 2015). This article addresses the relationship between the institutional and the individual as part of the context that determines the benefits and harms of surveillance.

Technological developments continue to make the practice of surveillance more efficient and to augment the role of agency and the individual. This article identifies and describes the role of the individual in the disciplining functionality of surveillance through inference within a specific context, providing insight into the actual mechanism of the disciplining possibilities of surveillance. In doing so, it prioritizes “meanings, interpretations, and knowledge construction” of those subject to it (Monahan 2011).

Data and Methods

This article is based on research conducted from 2016 to 2017. The principal research tool consists of 31 interviews conducted with NYC public housing residents and observations of surveillance objects in public housing taken over an approximately six-month period. The data are used to explore social processes undertaken by individuals in relation to surveillance structures and to interrogate the use of surveillance in public housing.

Approximately (50 percent) of the interviewee sample was recruited through the use of online advertisements. The remainder of the sample were recruited through advertisements disseminated by two nonprofit organizations involved in tenant’s rights, support, and empowerment to their client base and through snowball sampling. Both samples were roughly similar in terms of demographic, geographic, and experiential characteristics. Interviewees ranged in age from 18 to 60, with the age of the sample averaging at 39. Twelve of the residents identified as men, 19 identified as women, and no residents interviewed identified as transgender or nonbinary. Approximately 90 percent of residents interviewed were unmarried (single or divorced). Residents also were dispersed across the boroughs of NYC, with 5 interviewees from Manhattan, 5 from Queens, 12 from Brooklyn, and 9 from the Bronx. No interviews were conducted with residents from Staten Island. The residents I interviewed primarily self-identified as Black or African American (23 residents). Additionally, three residents identified as White, two identified as Hispanic, one identified as Black and Hispanic, one identified as biracial, and one identified as Native American. Black and Latinx residents are overrepresented in NYC public housing, whereas others, such as White and Asian residents, are underrepresented. In relation to the racial composition of NYC public housing residents at the time, both Black and White residents are overrepresented in the study, and Latinx residents are underrepresented. I speculate that underrepresentation of Hispanic/Latinx respondents may be related to the recruitment methods themselves and/or language barriers. The organizations I worked with for recruitment may work or be familiar to primarily Black residents, for example. In addition, the advertisements recruiting participants were in English only, which may have contributed to a lack of Spanish-speaking Latinx/Hispanic respondents within the public housing community.

All semi-structured interviews were conducted personally and in person in English. The typical interview lasted approximately one hour, with the longest interviews approaching two hours and the shortest concluding at around 45 minutes. Most of the interview time was spent discussing day-to-day life in public housing and experiences with surveillance.

Consent was discussed with all interviewees, and a consent form was signed. With a combined inductive and deductive approach, thematic analysis was used to explore the interviewee’s experiences in public housing, explicit and implicit understandings, rules and norms around surveillance, the various factors that influenced how surveillance was perceived, and the construction of meaning around surveillance and the various objects associated with surveillance. After entering interview data into the research coding software Dedoose, I first coded information according to themes that I noted throughout the interview process and in which I was interested in writing about. In later analysis of the data, I explored additional themes and added new codes as patterns emerged in the data. The quotations featured here are representative of themes found in multiple interviews. Pseudonyms, chosen from a list of “related” names generated through a baby naming website that aggregates name data about sibling names, have been given to participants to protect their privacy.

Observations of surveillance objects took place over a six-month period. These observations included making site visits to various public housing communities across the five boroughs of NYC. During this time, I visited approximately 30 public housing developments, including all of the developments from which I interviewed residents. During these visits, I noted the presence of surveillance objects, their appearance, and possible function.

Recruitment of all interviewees was initially done with the explicit purpose of talking about the commercial job-site lights present in many public housing complexes, which I observed to be the most visible and starkly different indications of heightened surveillance and which seemed to be specifically used within and around public housing. The motivation for this design was to narrow respondents to those public housing residents living in residences with job-site lights (which is most but not all), and all interviewees had experiences with that lighting and other surveillance objects and came from such diverse neighborhoods that neighborhood type could be contrasted in future studies.

At the time the interviews and observations were completed, marijuana was still illegal in NYC, although that has since changed. Many residents discussed marijuana use, and several expressly differentiated between the use of marijuana and the use of narcotic drugs in terms of surveillance and risk. In the findings and discussions, where necessary, I note that marijuana was at that time illegal. Because marijuana is no longer illegal, it may change the impact or interpretation of certain statements in important ways. Similarly, at the time of the interviews, the public housing administrator of NYC (NYCHA) had not yet entered into a series of complex public/private partnerships that, over time, intend to convert some public housing buildings to government-subsidized housing.

Findings

Findings are organized to demonstrate the processes by which surveillance becomes effective through inferences. First, I demonstrate that surveillance produces a disciplining effect among residents that hinges on inferences made about the possible function of surveillance. Second, I also show that a disciplining effect can still be produced even when it is either thought, assumed, or suspected that surveillance is ineffective or inapplicable and when surveillance is welcomed to combat crime. Third, I discuss data that indicate that some types of avoidance may be practiced as a result of the inferences made about surveillance.

Disciplining the Body

Some of the most striking accounts of inference involved interviewees altering their body movements and constraining their actions and choices in relation to surveillance and policing. In my own observations of public housing developments, I noticed that surveillance cameras and other surveillance objects were almost always linked to associations with police and policing, at times implicitly but often explicitly so, with large flashy “NYPD” or “Property of NYPD” signs. Among residents, concerns about policing were also often directly connected to concerns about maintaining housing access—criminality meant eviction. Although surveillance was largely embraced as necessary for crime deterrence and seen as beneficial, discontent with the function and risk of surveillance systems and policing were expressed in terms of those systems not serving the interests of the residents.

In relation to the possible data collected by surveillance objects, residents felt deep-seated anxiety about how the data they gathered would be used. Malik professes to fear that the cameras will capture an image of a crime being committed but that authorities will assume that it is him even if it is not. He states, “I get worried . . . you could have someone that looks exactly like me, my doppelgänger.” This worry leads Malik to constrain his body physically so it “doesn’t look like I’m not doing anything that’s not right.”

Sal, a single Black man in his early 40s, identifies with the portable job-site lights, or “the beams,” a sense of precarity within his immediate surroundings. He says:

[They] make me more aware of things, aware of my surroundings. I’m very watchful. I have nice things so I don’t want anybody to steal them, I have got to pay attention to who’s new on the strip or . . . that I haven’t seen. You know people break into people’s houses all the time.

In his statement about the lighting, Sal indicates a deep sense of anxiety. For Sal, the job-site lights mark the neighborhood as risky, and he infers what behavior is appropriate and makes choices according to this affirmative indicator of risk.

One long-time resident of NYC public housing, Sherman, a retired Black man in his late 50s, related the meaning of surveillance objects to a tightly controlled environment in which police forces are known “for taking somebody in for a beer, or smoking a nickel bag of [illegal] weed.” This kind of high control and high discipline expectation destabilizes environments, leading to structures of choice that reflect disciplinary possibilities.

Cameras, job-site lights, and other visible surveillance objects introduce the possibility of a new kind of visibility in public housing, one that is ubiquitous. Residents infer meanings in regards to the surveillance objects that are local and immediate to their environments, adjusting and constraining their movements and interactions. In Andrew’s social imaginary, the cops are ever-present, aided by surveillance. He thinks about the “malarkey, bad stuff” that could happen if he engages with friends “within seconds” of being presented with opportunities for social engagement that unknowingly connects him to crime. “I’m afraid,” Andrew said, of “jail, death, getting beaten up, or worst-case scenario, it spilling over onto my Mom’s place because, like, certain things that happen in [public housing] can have you evicted and whoever is staying there is evicted.” Once, Andrew, a young Black man, recalls becoming acutely aware of the cameras on the rooftop of his building—of being watched—when a woman offered to have sex with him for money. He refused the deal, flustered and panicking at the fear of being interpreted as engaging in a criminalized activity, telling the woman, “I’ll give you money, I mean just go.”

Tom says that his behavior is affected because of fear of police action for what he calls “minor misdemeanors.” He states that when he is walking in the street and especially when he notices police, cameras, and floodlights, “I’m aware of crimes, maybe petty things, not saying I’m a criminal or, but things like minor misdemeanors, like talking too loud in the streets or getting into it.” Others constrain their movements and avoid surveillance because they do not want to get involved or, as Eddie puts it, get “caught up in mixes and stuff.”

Eva, a young Black woman, suspected that cameras might even be used to capture images through the window, an inference that leads her to carefully close her curtains. Other residents report standing in different ways or in different places as they felt the presence of surveillance objects moved them to do. Andrew described the hyperawareness of being watched by associating his feeling that he could never be fully at rest at home: “Your attention is never completely on whoever you’re talking to, it’s always on the back [of your mind], they might come right now.”

Effective Surveillance That Does Not Work

Almost every resident interviewed could state where the surveillance cameras in their building were located. Kimberly, a middle-aged Black mom living with her teenage children, knows where the surveillance cameras in her building are located and often wonders if they work. She also asks herself “Are they doing their job?”

For residents, the function of surveillance objects like cameras were also often said to be questionable because either they appeared broken, they did not “see” enough, or there did not seem to be any follow-up from the housing administration or the NYPD. In other words, surveillance still produces effects among residents even when cameras are thought by residents to be broken or ineffective in preventing crime and even when surveillance is thought to be inapplicable to residents.

The ways residents assumed cameras did not work varied. Cameras might be broken or merely cover too minimal a coverage area. Several residents noted the ways that they understood true criminals strategized to avoid being detected, reporting crime taking place in the shadows, the vestibules just out of sight, or the playground. “The cameras, the lights, shake people up a little bit, but they don’t prevent much,” Aikira, a 25-year-old Black woman, explains. Her impression is that even though police presence is everywhere, for the mostly young men she reports as selling drugs and carrying guns who are adept at avoiding police, it is incredibly easy to slip out of view. Kimberly further notes that because most cameras produce an unmonitored feed, they are practically useless for preventing petty crime, such as purse stealing, or for guarding against assault, which is what she is most worried about when it comes to her own personal safety.

Several residents reported that drugs are sold in the shadows of playgrounds outside of buildings, where the lights are not bright enough and the cameras do not reach. The stairwells do not have cameras either; you might find someone passed out in the stairwell, and sometimes that is where drugs are sold. Even though there are cameras in the elevators, they do not seem to stop revelers and vagrants from relieving themselves there, a problem that was reported by many tenants as being something that impacted their daily life and informed them about the effectiveness of policing and state of social order more generally. Andrew comments that the presence of a camera “helps scare crime away but doesn’t help stop crime.” Rather, “If you wanted to commit a crime you’d just go to where the camera’s not pointing.” The only point of the cameras is “deterrence,” but crime is just going to “occur somewhere else.”

To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of surveillance, residents repeatedly brought up the fact that there are cameras in the elevators. If they work, they speculated, how come there is always urine in the elevators? Iram, a compact woman in her 20s who lives in public housing, reported that she carries mace around her neck and says that the reason she does this is “to protect herself in case anybody touches her.” Iram states that there are security cameras on every floor but that she does not think that they actually work. She says this because she has reported things to the supervisor that have happened—people smoking in the halls, trash being in the hallways—that she feels should have been caught by the cameras that actually were not. Nevertheless, the lights and the cameras make Iram feel safer even though she does not think either of them work for crime deterrence. Instead, she believes, drugs are sold by the playground where there are no cameras or lights, although people commit crimes and break the rules openly in the hallways and elevators even though there are supposedly cameras there.

However, when managing risk specific to the context of public housing, inferences about the possibilities of surveillance drove how residents themselves related to them. Azani once spent a week selling drugs, narcotics and then-illegal marijuana, in her neighborhood. She laughs, “I’m too scared really, I was too scared so I couldn’t do it.” At the time we spoke, Azani, a young Black woman, worked in an office building in downtown Manhattan. When she was selling drugs, she describes feeling like she was unable to hide what she was doing from anyone around her, as if they could “see it right in [her] face.” She reported that drugs, especially narcotics, have a big influence in her neighborhood and her neighbors are too scared to even whisper about the sale of narcotics in her building because the drug sellers and “fiends” are everywhere. When she was both selling small amounts of drugs and smoking then-illegal marijuana, she felt “paranoid” that she was going to be arrested because she always felt the cops could be “watching” her, although she was never stopped.

Once, before the job-site lights were installed, Azani was robbed in the yard of her public housing complex. She was not badly hurt, but she was scuffed up a little, and her smartphone was taken. She did not bother calling the cops because she had no faith that they would be able to identify her assailant, even with camera footage. But when the job-site lights were put up, she felt that perhaps it would prevent that kind of situation from happening again. She lamented, though, in seeming contradiction to her experience of the “paranoia” of “being watched” and her failure to call them, that the police presence in her neighborhood was actually too rare and that although things were more visible in some ways, there was never anybody around to do anything about crimes that might occur. In other words, crime control in general, including the cameras, was ineffective, and yet she still felt vulnerable to becoming a target of it.

Azani wants crimes such as mugging and assault, which she has been the victim of, to be important enough to warrant the full attention of the police and to be the focus of surveillance. In short, she wants a safe residential space where reasonable steps are taken to prevent crime but currently does not even have enough faith in the ability of the government to accomplish this to even call the police after being assaulted and robbed. However, Azani has also felt that she is being watched by police surveillance, as if they are ever-present, primarily in terms of committing crimes related to drug use and sale. This kind of criminality, she feels, can even be read on her face.

Many people I spoke to were careful to avoid the cameras even if they felt like they were ineffective and even when they did not identify as engaging in wrongdoing. According to Eva: “I’m being watched regardless. [My family] are like: watch the cameras, don’t do anything stupid, stuff like that. Don’t act like you don’t have any sense, don’t be ridiculous. For us, there could be punishment, I’m not sure how severe, but yeah.”

Surveillance in public housing was effective even when residents felt exceptional compared to the other public housing residents under surveillance. Often, residents emphasized that surveillance systems were necessary, although not for them as a subject because they had “nothing to hide.” However, the cameras were feared to not work in this way as well—that they might see a criminal where there was not one.

Although most interviewees felt they had nothing to hide, they worried how the system of surveillance was watching them. Residents related this to the relationship residents have with police and a history of overpolicing in public housing. In regards to policing, Darnell observed how being within the borders of a public housing complex changed how he felt he was perceived as a young Black man:

There’s nobody from the community policing the community, that’s how it supposed to be, so when it’s not like that, that becomes the problem. How can I come and police where you’re from when there’s out-of-state, Long Island or wherever you’re from? How can I come and police here when I don’t really know anything about [it]? I have to at least get familiar with your surroundings before you police something like, just because, . . . because of the simple fact of . . . you might come through and see me dressed like this, this is how I dress on my off day, but then when I go to work [I might] wear a three-piece suit and then put some glasses on or whatever like that, but the first impression you get is how I dress because I’m in the hood.

Darnell describes a feeling that within his residential environment, he feels that he is automatically seen in a predetermined way by police, especially those who are not from his community.

Darnell describes feeling stigmatized personally, whereas other residents described a similar feeling of their environment being stigmatized by surveillance. Residents described the surveillance objects as ghastly and “prison-like” in terms of visibility and increased feelings of ambivalence about personal safety. Cynthia, a 60-year-old Black woman, reports that she feels embarrassed by the job-site lights, which she feels mark her community:

It’s a little unnerving because it’s like only in our neighborhood, only in the public housing developments and it’s not in the regular streets. I wonder if there’s a way they can put lighting up in the poles that would do the same thing instead of having this monstrosity, you know facing us and it’s like, it’s intimidating, it’s not very pretty, it’s a little embarrassing if people come to visit you and they see this thing, it’s like you know it’s almost in a jail atmosphere. But like I said it’s a [double-edged] sword, I feel a little safer and I think the criminals think twice.

Although Cynthia, similarly to others, does not see the immediate necessity, she is willing, on the off chance that lights and other surveillance objects deter criminals, to put up with a “monstrosity” that she also feels marks and stigmatizes her residence, even though doing so reportedly causes her embarrassment. The production of stigma is another way that surveillance does not work, at least for residents of public housing who must contend with it in their everyday lives.

Inferences May Lead to Avoidance

Some residents report attempting to avoid being surveilled, which is one way to demonstrate surveillance is effective—it motivates individuals to change their habits. Residents also reported that surveillance was linked to a choice to avoid social relationships within their residential space and to avoid nodes of social control, such as police and the employees of the public housing administrator.

For Andrew, the surveillance objects in his environment are associated with “jail, death, getting beaten,” or the chance that his mother and family would be kicked out of housing because of him getting in trouble. As a result, he reports that he avoids making friendships within his public housing building, instead choosing to make friends outside of the neighborhood. Avoidance of community, if practiced widely, could lead to communal dissolution.

A sense of disempowerment also informs avoidance. For example, Kimberly narrated a situation in which maintenance men had called on her late in the night, while her teenage daughters were home. She felt that it was “inappropriate” for the men to enter her apartment at such a late hour but allowed it for fear of reprisal by the housing administrator. A sense of disempowerment is linked to the context of coercion and care in which housing is made contingent on behavior under constant surveillance.

Kerem, a White, multigenerational resident of public housing, makes most of his income off the books and worries that his actual income could disqualify him from receiving housing assistance. He actively tries to hide signs of affluence; for example, after he purchased a smartphone, he pretended to use a nonfunctional flip phone around the building so that nobody would know he had a smartphone and so they would not wonder where the extra income was coming from.

Kerem is deeply concerned about maintaining his reputation as “just a regular public housing tenant with nothing to hide” with the other tenants, security guards, maintenance crew, and administrators and also in front of the cameras. He also reports that he prefers to sleep on a friend’s couch (outside of public housing) when it is very cold and the heat is out rather than possibly becoming a nuisance to maintenance people. In preserving his access to housing, Kerem avoids others associated with the administration of public housing even when there would likely be benefits in doing so.

Reputation management, justification of punitive structures as fair, and acceptance and embrace of social control mechanisms that disproportionately inconvenience and target him personally are structural contexts that Kerem accommodates as a public housing resident. Although confident and well-spoken, Kerem approaches annual apartment checks, the potential power of nosy neighbors, the risks of becoming one of those tenants who sticks their neck out about unanswered maintenance calls, and of course, the police as a disempowered housing tenant at risk of being unhoused. The skills he has learned to manage his own fears and risks are primarily avoidance-based and are reflective of perceived disempowerment within the institution of public housing.

Discussion

This article brings new insights into surveillance in institutional spaces (Foucault 1995) and further demonstrates how surveillance, specifically, electronic surveillance, is used and becomes effective in public housing in the context of both care and coercion (Fong 2020; Hughes 2020; Moore 2011). A disciplining assembly of surveillance has particular implications for underresourced urban communities and individuals, and this article highlights processes through which this becomes so through electronic surveillance that disparately affects vulnerable communities (Brayne 2014; Fong 2020; Garland 2002; Turney and Wakefield 2019). This article also further confirms that the disciplining assembly of surveillance is able to extend into the residential sphere of public housing by virtue of its institutional nature (Hughes 2020).

The findings demonstrate a specific process of inference through which the visible, electronic segment of the surveillant assemblage is linked to other processes of social control and regulation of spaces built to assist the financially struggling or relatively low income (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). For all their presence in contemporary society, types and implementation modes of state surveillance have been little studied, and the phenomenon is not as straightforward as might be assumed (Fong 2020). By looking at surveillance through the lens of inference, understanding of a mechanism of disciplining through environmental, passive, electronic surveillance emerges.

The study of coercive environments like that of public housing shows that the power of electronic surveillance is functionally inferred by residents in consideration of their own experiences and understandings and within the context of associating their own neighborhoods with violence, disorganization, and policing. Residents imbued surveillance objects heavily with meaning and the power to suss out criminality even when residents felt that such objects did not necessarily function correctly. This disciplining extends through interaction between residents and surveillance objects.

Public housing developments are residential spaces with stigmatizing histories that drive the carceral orientation of surveillance implemented by governmental authorities such as police and public housing administrators. Surveillance of the kind deployed in NYC public housing is highly visible and is a continuation of dense policing, surveillance, and control characteristic of predominantly Black and Latinx American communities (Duneier 2016). Surveillance in public housing effects a kind of social isolation that is linked, in the context of their usage and orientation and at times explicitly by residents, to a history of overpolicing, police violence, and mass incarceration.

Although the article discusses electronic surveillance, it primarily focuses not on actual capabilities of surveillance but perception of capabilities of the highly visible surveillance-related objects. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of context, such as an environment of care and coercion, in the internalization of discipline (Foucault 1971).

A Disciplining Effect Surveillance Produces among Public Housing Residents Is through Inferences Made about the Functional Risk of Surveillance Objects

For residents like Andrew, Kimberly, Kerem, Malik, Sal, Cynthia, and others, the presence of surveillance and the meaning they have constructed around them lead to constraints on their behavior and the choices that they make. Some of the choices are small, such as the choice to close one’s curtains for fear that surveillance might see inside. Other choices are more consequential, such as the choice to forgo social relationships. Other disciplining effects seem to be less active choice and more reflexive, such as disciplining the body when under a camera’s gaze.

The findings around the processes of inference relating to surveillance prioritize “meanings, interpretations, and knowledge construction” of public housing residents (Monahan 2011). Surveillance in public housing produced inferences about disciplinary possibilities, which, in turn, produced a disciplining effect among some of those under surveillance. This is demonstrated through the relationship residents have with surveillance, including through residents’ characterizations of the ways they describe the effects on their physical movements and choices. The everyday interactions with surveillance, through the inferences made about their disciplinary possibilities, are themselves transformative of residents’ social reality (de Certeau 1984; Tilly 1986).

Surveillance within poverty regimes is a surveillant assemblage with several interrelated modalities and has real effects for residents. The assembly of surveillance extends to residents by virtue of the institutional nature of public housing. However, the mechanism of this discipline, which is unique in a residential context associated with intimate, private spaces, is more fully understood.

A Disciplining Effect Can Be Produced Even When It Is either Thought, Assumed, or Suspected That Surveillance Objects Do Not Work or Are Ineffective

My findings point to surveillance at the nexus of public housing as a generator of a social context in which objects associated with electronic surveillance become imbued with disciplinary power through the inferences made about them, whether or not they function as prescribed. Surveillance cameras are associated not only with other indications of police presence—the job-site lighting or physical police presence—but also previous personal experiences of residents and their networks.

Importantly for understanding the way that surveillance “works” is that the disciplining effect of surveillance can be produced even when it is either thought, assumed, or suspected that surveillance is ineffective. This is tension that further animates the relationship between surveillance and residents. The function of surveillance thus did not necessarily rely on the actual function of surveillance to work; rather, it relied on the inference of residents that it may work. This is a complex interaction, which rests in the experiences and inferences of residences across time and within their social networks. The inferences residents make concerning surveillance demonstrate the power of surveillance to discipline even without a definite linked function of the surveillant assemblage, adding nuance and theoretical implications to previous studies of the function of the surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000).

Residents often felt that the surveillance objects visible and present in their everyday routines did little by way of alleviating danger to their personal safety or property. Although surveillance is often thought not to work, inferences about the function of surveillance objects were still made by those being surveilled, leading them to change bodily practices, make choices with surveillance in mind, and strategize in avoiding it. These inferences reference the social and historical context of disciplinary actors and leads to bodily awareness of surveillance even in the absence of deviance. For example, when Sherman links surveillance to an increase of unjust or unwarranted interactions between police and residents (e.g., arresting someone for drinking a beer), he is making an inference about the meaning and possibilities of surveillance.

The effectiveness of surveillance coupled with beliefs about its failure to function may also represent the power of the symbolism of control and risk, signaling both the possibility of becoming a victim of crime and coming under suspicion as a perpetrator of wrongdoing. For many residents, the cameras require them to make inferences about new ways to extend their knowledge of how to stay safe—for example, by closing window curtains to prevent the cameras from being able to “see inside” a residence, avoiding cameras, adjusting one’s movements, or constraining one’s voice. The cameras need not prove their function or disfunction; rather, inference is made in their connection to policing and the myriad of ramifications that this brings.

Surveillance, including the visible objects associated with surveillance, is also one way the state continues to create boundaries around race (see e.g., Byfield 2019). Given the relative concentration of both race and poverty in NYC housing, the use of surveillance by police becomes implicitly associated with other types of racialized policing (Bell 2020; Browne 2015). Malik’s risk assessment, for example, takes into account his own experience and the historical disposition of police toward racial bias and scientific confirmation of race bias in eyewitness identification (Behrman and Davey 2001). Torin Monahan (2011) notes that public housing residents are treated paternalistically and as criminal suspects themselves, and Malik is implicitly and explicitly aware of this, as are others that engage in various types of self-disciplining.

Surveillance further serves as a “durable barrier to social inclusion” because it effects self-imposed social isolation in addition to feelings of stigmatization and anxiety (Monahan 2010:81). Cynthia described the “monstrosity” of the surveillance objects in her residential environment as a double-edged sword. Surveillance offers both benefits and harms, which she recognizes. Furthermore, both benefits and harms to the individual speak directly to the “multiplicity and fluidity” of surveillance (Marx 2014). The only reason, to her, to condone the imposition of surveillance is that it could make her residence safer. This is both an institutional and an individual need (Marx 2014). However, she feels stigmatized by them and does not seem confident that they do indeed do anything to protect her personal safety. If widely experienced, such embarrassment and stigmatization could lead to fewer social bonds and less investment in the home and community at individual and institutional levels.

This durable barrier is also generated in the process of making inferences about the subject of the surveillance. Nandi (2010) shows that criminal categories, including the archetypical urban criminal, can be created through the imaginaries of the state and middle classes. Residents of public housing also construct ideas about an archetypical urban criminal that is not like them but for whom they must constantly be vigilant.

Inferences Made in Relation to Surveillance Objects May Contribute to Avoidance Practices

Inferences made by residents about the possible function of surveillance objects ranged. At times, residents demonstrated these inferences in reporting personal practices of avoidance within their residential communities—avoiding social interactions and avoiding streets or areas that are thought to be more or less dangerous or more or less surveilled.

Individuals under heightened surveillance often avoid other surveilling institutions, such as hospitals and schools, and this has detrimental effects on their well-being in a phenomenon referred to as “systems avoidance” (Brayne 2014; Goffman 2014). The findings do show some instances of a similar kind of avoidance within the housing institution and outside it and suggest that avoidance may be more widely practiced. For example, several residents expressed concern about contacting the police except in the most extreme situations, even to access health care. Another example, Kerem, avoids every node of the institution of public housing purposefully even though interaction might lead to better outcomes, including when his heat went out in the winter and it was too cold to sleep in his apartment.

In making choices to engage in avoidance, residents drew from experience of dwelling in a “blemished setting,” marked by crime and fear to make inferences about the surveillance objects in their immediate environments (Wacquant 2010:170). For the residents interviewed, the presence of surveillance has the possibility to contribute meaningfully to avoidance practices and also to contribute to decreased communal strength. Avoidance in its various forms and its effects may also be a type of harm that individuals experience in this type of surveilled environment.

Conclusion

One effect of visible electronic surveillance in the context of public housing is to produce inferences made by residents about the disciplining possibilities of surveillance. These inferences are the result of social processes that demonstrate the “effectiveness” of surveillance. Such inferences drive the relationship between residents and surveillance and may themselves be transformative in the sense that they influence the actions of residents. The use of inference sheds light on the way that surveillance “works” in the context of governmental surveillance and imposition of social control.

The case of electronic surveillance deployed in public housing in NYC allows better understanding of how electronic surveillance is used within the context of both care and coercion. To deduce the effectiveness and outcomes of the use of electronic surveillance methods within governance strategies, further case studies that compare social processes developed around surveillance may further nuance observations and conclusions drawn. Such case studies could include usage of electronic surveillance within public or subsidized housing contexts in additional localities, including neighborhoods where there is a concentration of housing assistance voucher holders, ³ and in other private housing contexts or scenarios. NYC is somewhat unique in that recipients of public housing are said to be more concentrated than in other major urban areas. Additionally, New York policing strategies evolved in particular ways following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which may further uniquely influence the way that surveillance is used.

However, as public housing developments reorganize as public/private entities and take increasing advantage of federal funding programs, more developments have been able to afford increasingly sophisticated surveillance. More than 85 public housing authorities across the country were granted HUD Emergency Safety and Security Grants in the years 2021 and 2022 and also indicated that they planned to invest those funds in surveillance systems (MacMillan 2023). Furthermore, as surveillance tools have become more sophisticated, they have increasingly been used to punish residents for small infractions (MacMillan 2023). This has led to increased attention to surveillance practices among residents and advocates (MacMillan 2023). The findings of this article are increasingly relevant to a growing social problem and to the public and subsidized housing developments that are the recipients of intensive surveillance.

The surveillance objects present in public housing are affirmative markers of social control, communicating through inference the disciplining possibility of the environment. Although the surveillance objects described in and around NYC public housing are particularly stark, this may not be the case in other circumstances even when a controlling environment may still be said to exist. As surveillance and the understanding of the possibilities of electronic surveillance and data analysis become more familiar to surveilled populations, these affirmative signals of control may become more subtle without losing their disempowering, disciplining, dog whistle effect. For this reason, the disciplinary power of inference may be extended beyond this case study to environments where surveillance indicators are less stark or less visible.

What do residents want, then, if they acknowledge the legitimacy of surveillance as one method of crime control, at times even characterizing existing surveillance as not being enough? The extraordinary social acceptance of surveillance generally, especially in terms of the availability of personal surveillance systems used to protect personal property, does stand at odds with a critique of the system of surveillance that public housing residents have access to. That is, the police and public housing authorities conduct the surveillance, and there are not rights-based or constitutional protections applied to the use of the data produced by it. Although surveillance is quite common in residential scenarios, such surveillance is more typically conducted by individuals in their own homes using direct-to-consumer residential surveillance products rather than the tactical-grade surveillance of public housing. Consumer-oriented surveillance lends the resident ultimate control over their orientation and data gathered. For example, the Ring camera company, which makes a popular version of household cameras, states that in exigent circumstances, their own policy is to allow police to access data when they believe circumstances demand it ⁴ ; however, when extreme circumstances do not exist, they require a “valid and binding legal demand like a search warrant” before granting access (Crist 2022). No such requirement exists in public housing, where governmental authorities control surveillance (Owens 2023) and in which various government agencies may access camera footage by filing an electronic request form.

Residents see potential good in surveillance while at the same time acknowledging its risks and problems. Implementing legal protections similar to those enjoyed by the users of private residential security systems seems like a natural first step in addressing this tension and acknowledging the dual desire for increased crime control and increased autonomy.

Public housing residents deserve to reside in a safe environment, and order is the foundation of the social contract (Rousseau 2009). Electronic surveillance is viewed generally as a cost-effective and less risky mode of policing; however, the use of surveillance also produces consequences for residents that are detrimental to creating a safe environment. Violence and personal risk within urban environments is of significant personal and governmental concern, and maintaining safe spaces is in the public interest. As well, police surveillance of an oversurveilled population deserves adequate examination. Improving the relationship between police and public housing residents such that policing is not associated with negative outcomes and disparate treatment will better lend legitimacy to the arrangement.

For electronic surveillance in particular, transparency and guarantees concerning data privacy are two guideposts for future implementation of electronic surveillance infrastructure placed in the context of care. In addressing neighborhood violence in urban environments, significant public investment in social programs and infrastructure and programs that incorporate restorative and community justice principles have been shown to be promising (Clarke 1983; Hope 1995; Kurki 2000; Moore 1992; Tonry and Farrington 1995). However, concerning the use of surveillance within public housing environments, increasing income disparity, sky-rocketing real estate prices in many urban areas, and a withering social safety net mean that individuals who rely on public or government subsidized housing have little power or recourse to challenge the coercive nature of surveillance within their residential space.