Data
Data overview
Esri is gaining a monopolistic hold on geo-spatial data and data management, and their products have become increasingly indispensable to police forces all across north america
List of data sources
- Attend and observe Esri’s 2023 User Conference and Esri’s 2023 Summit on Security and Safety
- Read and view Esri’s publications for training police, including Esri’s textbooks for law enforcement; crime analysis website; and webinars on policing and geo-spatial analysis
- 60 FOI requests with individual police departments and municipalities in Canada and the United States to collect License Agreements and documentation of training, purchase orders, and decision-making on usage of Esri products
Our process
Methods
With this project, we map out the various relationships between police forces and the tech company Esri. We do so in order to explore the way that municipal police forces across the US and Canada increasingly rely on GIS to go about their work of policing, increasingly rely on Esri, with it’s ever-expanding list of products and trainings for law enforcement, it’s spatial data repository, and it’s insistence upon itself as the industry standard.
Esri’s technologies are central to the expansive system of surveillance- and data-driven policing in New York City; Ogden, Utah’s efforts to identify and eliminate homeless encampments, and Berkeley police’s efforts to legitimize themselves in the face of public outcry around racial policing.
Research Questions
We asked, what tools and technologies does Esri offer to police forces in the US and Canada? How do police forces in the US and Canada use Esri’s tools? And, what do the relationships between Esri and municipal police forces in the US and Canada look like?
To answer these questions, we made freedom of information requests, collected documents and information from Esri and police websites, and also observed at Esri’s User Conference.
Freedom of Information Requests
We submitted Freedom of Information requests to city governments and police forces in 62 cities in Canada and the United States. 45 sent us records. 6 have ignored our requests — meaning the requests have been outstanding for many months. 4 refused to provide records. 6 responded that they have no records to provide.
We selected cities that would vary in size and geographic region. Some of the cities we selected were ones that we knew had a police-Esri relationship because Esri featured them on their website, or we could see on the police force’s website an ArcGIS map. For other cities, we knew the city’s police force was working with mapping and geography because of a highly publicized police killing that was connected to hot spot policing. For others, we did not have any idea of whether or not there would be a police-Esri connection.
Some police forces contract directly with Esri. Others use their City’s or State’s Esri contract. Some don’t have a license agreement with Esri on file but may have purchased software through a third party vendor. Still others don’t contract with Esri at all. This meant we needed to make requests with both City and Police.
When we began the freedom of information requests, we asked for a large number of documents and details. However, we noticed that the responses would in many cases be delayed for very long periods of time or ignored. We then shifted strategies, asking simply for the license agreement. Once this was provided, we followed up with additional requests. This was a more fruitful approach in our case.
Sample of the original FOI request text:
Observations at Esri User Conference:User Conference
One of us attended the 2023 Esri User Conference, including the pre-conference Safety and Security Summit. She took ethnographic notes and attended presentations by and for police on how to use Esri’s law enforcement and public safety tools.
Other publicly available documents
We collected textbooks, e-book, and literature that Esri sells to teach police how to use GIS and Esri products. We reviewed these, as well as Esri’s webinars and the law enforcement portion of their website. We also examined the websites of the police forces we filed requests.
Data Analysis
A team of us reviewed all of the documents that came in.
The information we received from cities was highly variable in quality and we determined that we would not be able to find quantitative relationships between size of police budget and number of Esri users on the police force, for example.
One of us assembled the information into a spreadsheet that included geolocation data for the police headquarters, the kind of license agreement that the police participated in, the size of the city and police force, the size of the city and police budget, as well as what information we were able to get on the number of police users, kinds of Esri tools that the police used, years of the contract, and how much money the police were providing to Esri.
Another of us analyzed the data for themes. We then developed intensive case studies that demonstrate the various ways that Esri-police relationships in different city reflect these themes. We used data and information from the Esri User Conference observations, Esri’s training materials, and Esri and police websites to deepen our case studies.