A Discussion with trina reynolds-tyler, Shakeer Rahman, and Cynthia Conti-Cook
May 8, 2024
As law enforcement surveillance grows with increasingly powerful tools, organizers, lawyers, and municipalities are finding ways to leverage the power of impacted communities to expose and curtail invasive and discriminatory surveillance practices. Some jurisdictions have passed surveillance ordinances, requiring law enforcement to disclose efforts to acquire new surveillance technologies prior to purchase and to annually audit law enforcement surveillance infrastructure. Some organizations are using public records and community-collected data to expose law enforcement practices, democratizing access to information on police violence and misconduct complaints, predictive policing, and data-driven policing. Others are leading campaigns to fight surveillance in city budgets. And others still are exposing the links between city services and police surveillance, calling for more democratic engagement and building campaigns to challenge the concentration of surveillance tools and data sharing across government sectors. Speakers trina reynolds-tyler from the Invisible Institute in Chicago, Shakeer Rahman of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and Cynthia Conti-Cook of the Surveillance Resistance Lab explored how communities are building power to counter-surveil the surveillance state.
Speakers
trina reynolds-tyler is the Data Director at the Invisible Institute, a journalist, and a native of the South Side Chicago. She leads Beneath the Surface, a project employing machine learning to identify gender-based violence at the hands of Chicago police. She won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting (with Sarah Conway) for their investigation “Missing in Chicago.” trina works to document how communities unable to depend on the police are forced to create safety and accountability outside of the carceral state. As a data scientist, she centers the practice of narrative justice in her inquiries. trina is an abolitionist and trained restorative justice practitioner, an organizer with Not Me We, and is serving on a University of Chicago council attempting to measure the institution’s impact on local residents of the South Side. She developed the skills to use data science for real world problems as a Pozen Center for Human Rights intern with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and was a Pearson Institute Fellow. trina holds a masters degree in public policy from the University of Chicago.
Shakeer Rahman is an attorney working within the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Los Angeles Community Action Network. Shakeer previously worked as Senior Staff Attorney at The Bail Project and as an Impact Litigation Attorney at The Bronx Defenders, where he was a Skadden Fellow. Before that, Shakeer was a law clerk to Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on the Supreme Court of California and to Judge Beverly Martin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Shakeer is licensed to practice in California and New York. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was a Harvard Law Review editor, and a B.A. in South Asian history from Columbia University. Shakeer is also a part-time lecturer at UCLA School of Law, where he co-teaches a clinic on community lawyering and public records research.
Cynthia Conti-Cook is Director of Research & Policy at the Surveillance Resistance Lab, where she co-authored the March 2024 report, MyCity, INC: A Case Against “CompStat Urbanism." Prior to that she was a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team, where she helps build grantees’ capacity to respond to the expanding use of surveillance technologies against immigrant communities, as well as the potential use of technology to criminalize people who seek or aid abortions. Conti-Cook is author of “Open Data Policing” (Georgetown Law Journal Online, 2017) and co-author “Extradition in Post-Roe America” (CUNY Law Review, 2023). Her article “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary” (University of Baltimore Law Review, 2020) was featured on CNN, NYTimes, NBC, VICE, and MSNBC. Before joining the Ford Foundation, Conti-Cook was a civil rights litigator and public defender at the Legal Aid Society of New York, where she pioneered a first-of-its-kind public database (CAPstat) that tracks misconduct by New York City police officers. Her work on CAPstat has been featured in prominent news outlets and is being replicated by other public defender offices across the country. Conti-Cook received a J.D. from CUNY School of Law and a B.A. from Bard College.
Moderated by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.
The Surveillance, Criminalization, and Punishment speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Professor of Sociology; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.