Week 10: How are we surveilled, and how are we surveilling?

On policing bodies and minds in libraries

A note: this post mentions police brutality, though not in detail.

We [myself, my peers, the greater book world, laypeople] often idealize library spaces and library missions: they are bastions of democracy; they are safe, non-commercialized spaces; they provide services without discriminating based on [insert qualifier here]. This vocational awe of librarianship, as Fobazi Ettarh termed it, masks the ways in which libraries are the product of harm and cause harm. The first libraries in the United States were built using the labor of enslaved persons, and they were spaces where landed white gentry discussed and codified the commoditization of enslaved human beings. In the Jim Crow South, state laws barred Black people from learning how to read. Today’s urban public libraries have a policing problem, as reported in Teen Vogue. Ella Fassler and Anya Ventura’s February article details how public funds are directed towards police presence in public libraries: a presence that results in the undue harassment of unhoused people, disabled people, and people of color. This is not surprising: harassment of and violence towards people of color, disabled people, and unhoused people are endemic in policing, regardless of the space in which that policing occurs. Whether it is on a street corner, or a traffic light, or in someone’s own home, the common denominator is the police.

Policing in libraries—all libraries—is as much a part of the police brutality public health crisis as policing in every other public and private space in this country. The thin argument for police presence in libraries, as noted in that Teen Vogue article, is that “With the disintegration of the social safety net, librarians are often called upon to respond to crises for which they have little professional training — becoming, in effect, de facto social workers.” This reality relates to the issue of vocational awe: librarians are not trained mental health professionals, social workers, or health care workers. We cannot and should not expect librarians to administer Naloxone (seriously, read that first section of Ettarh’s article), and we cannot expect librarians to simply know how to take care of people in mental health crises (I certainly don’t have any deescalation trainings on my syllabi). But we cannot expect untrained law enforcement officers to do that either.

Not only in this police presence in libraries ineffective or outright harmful, it depletes already strapped resources. In Los Angeles, 5% of the public library budget is dedicated to policing. The money to pay for police in libraries does not come from the police budget, it comes from the library budgets, which means that money is not being used for any of the resources or personnel libraries need in order to best serve their users. The root of harmful encounters between patrons and police is not poorly or unprepared librarians, but over allocation of resources (money!) to policing instead of literally any of the people who could intervene in incidents and care for people in public spaces safely.

These are not new ideas, but it is difficult to get them to stick. The week I began this newsletter (just two weeks after that Teen Vogue article was published), I read a paper in which the author offers 10 suggestions on how to institutionalize new services or programs. His second-to-last question asks librarians how they will plan to “authenticate or verify membership to determine who you will actually serve.” His reasoning:

1. Defining policy on who one serves helps denote when that service is employed, and

2. Library resources are limited, and librarians cannot be expected to provide everything to everyone all of the time (borrowing books, or photocopying services, or computer services, or over-the-phone reference, and so on).

The author suggests that libraries can institute the use of library card numbers, PINs, or passwords to access online services, but how do they regulate in-person services to ensure they are serving their constituent population?

The immediate trade-off to setting hard and fast rules about to whom you provide services is that you create barriers. If someone doesn’t have ID and cannot verify who they are or where they live, they might be barred access to information. Or if patrons do not comply with a code of conduct, which might prevent sleeping or “monopolizing furniture or outlets” or emitting body odor—meaning, if they are not perceived as fitting into the space and using the space “appropriately”—how do librarians approach these patrons? A punitive library would kick them out, possibly using force.

Last week in two of my classes, we had sessions on library services for diverse populations and diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries. These services vary: they look like training to assist with homeless patrons in compassionate manners and delivering services at times and places convenient to them. They look like foreign language tutorials and reference materials, multi-language signage and handouts. They look like job search skills and readiness, legal literacy, computer and internet skills for incarcerated patrons. One of takeaways from these conversations is that the strongest anti-racist and equity work is not compartmentalized to one day or one training or one element of libraries, but integrated across services, programs, materials, interfaces, spaces, practices, personnel, policies... everywhere, always.¹

In this conversation, we discussed policing in libraries, and someone asked, “Should we have social workers in libraries?” As you might have guessed from what I’ve written, I said hell yeah we should have social workers in libraries! I would very much prefer that my tax dollars go to equipping public services with personnel who can deescalate someone having a mental health crisis in a shared (or private) space. Instead of policing those bodies, instead of barring them from our shared spaces, we must figure out how to invite them in and make our spaces safe for them.

Librarianship has already set a precedence for resisting punitive and invasive practices: Librarians have a history of fighting against the encroachment of government on people’s privacy. In the 1960s, librarians protested the FBI’s attempts to track Vietnam protestors’ reading habits. In the 1970s, librarians resisted the US Treasury’s tracking of patrons checking out books on explosives. In the 1980s, the American Library Association explicitly disavowed the FBI’s directive to librarians to report suspicious usage and search, noting the librarians have an obligation first to patrons’ privacy. Now, librarians increasingly advocate for patrons’ internet privacy to protect themselves from invasive aggregation and sale of their data. Public libraries have complied with de facto and de jure discrimination, and public librarians have had an adversarial history with the government. Both things can be true. The FBI has called librarians “radical” and “militant” for not complying with federal law to submit patrons to government surveillance. Other government officials referred to librarians as “social-activist bosses,” which, yes, please put that on a pin for me to wear with all of my sweaters.

These fights have been about protecting people’s right to find and acquire information privately, without their data being stored, mined, and sold to third parties. This resistance means that the government cannot ask a librarian what someone searched for so that they could then arrest people for their thoughts.² I’m of the belief that libraries should also protect the bodily autonomy of its users. When you are in a library, you should be protected from the policing of your body as well as your mind.

As I am writing this, the Internet is reacting to the release of footage of Chicago police murdering 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month. I will not watch this video, because this child deserves his dignity, even as it was stripped from him in his unnecessary, unjust death and the undue excoriation he and his family received in the press thereafter. Earlier this week, Daunte Wright was murdered at a traffic stop in Minneapolis—a traffic stop spurred by a warrant which was issued because the county courthouse sent a hearing notice to the wrong address. And all of this thunders above the trial of Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd last summer. Police violence persists. Libraries have an obligation to protect their patrons—all of their patrons—and eradicate that violence from their spaces.

Last week, our guest speaker concluded our User Services session with a very clear directive: “By being a librarian, you are in social justice work. Whether you are active or passive in that depends on you.”

Housekeeping & Birdseeding

house

• I have finals the next two weeks, so this newsletter might appear in abbreviated form, or not at all, as I finish up my work for this term.

• What I read this week: What we talk about when we talk about books, by Leah Price.

• What I am currently reading: What it means when a man falls from the sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah.

bird

• Woke up every morning this week to birdsong.

More later.

1. The irony here, of course, is that we had one designated class period for explicitly discussing diversity. This was not lost on myself or my classmates. That being said, many of our conversations in the last 13 weeks have incorporated race, class, age, and ability, among other factors, as we’ve discussed management and user services. And there is a lot of power and value in making that which is implicit explicit.

2. Has everyone watched The Trial of Chicago Seven yet? That Sacha Baron Cohen line made my blood run cold. Also, I periodically remember that he’s married to Isla Fisher and am always surprised. What a couple.