Safe or Just Surveilled?: Tawana Petty on the Fight Against Facial Recognition Surveillance

Notes from the front lines of organizing and community technology in Detroit.

Safe or Just Surveilled?: Tawana Petty on the Fight Against Facial Recognition Surveillance Organizers across the US have been building a movement to ban police use of facial recognition technology. To date, they have won municipal-level bans in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, as well as in Somerville, MA; however, the struggle against surveillance technology continues elsewhere. We talked to Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty about what that fight looks like in Detroit, a majority-Black city where global capitalism and municipal disinvestment have left many Black residents below the poverty line.

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