Global Knowledge / American Police: Information, International Collaboration, and the Rise of Technocratic “Color-Blind” Policing

With the deprioritizing of ethnic policing, the NYPD increasingly leaned on technocratic solutions and surveillance that would allow Anglo-American police the ability to identify, track, and control even the most “unknowable” and foreign communities. Imported from Europe, where they had been essential in England, France, and Germany's colonial governance, fingerprinting, photographs, criminal files, and other form of biometrics and information management were relied on heavily by the US police. These methods created “paper suspects” capable of being read and deciphered by police, even while they struggled to question the physical person. Part of the intellectualizing and globalizing of this model of policing was the creation and dissemination of academic disciplines that legitimized policing procedure as “color-blind” and empirical.