Abstract
Increased citizen interaction with the criminal justice system on digital platforms renders citizens more vulnerable to breaches of information to third parties. We introduce the concept of digital vulnerability to measure the extent to which technology produces unequal exposure to risk of data breaches. Using police-dispatcher radio communication, we examine the extent to which dispatchers reveal identifiable information about callers reporting crime. Data come from sixty audio-recorded hours of police-dispatcher radio communication across three racially distinct police radio zones in Chicago. Findings revealed that one of every ten calls made to police in zones serving racial minorities disclosed caller names or home addresses. We discuss implications for research on racial inequality in criminal justice contact, police-community relations, and policies concerning police-dispatcher radio communication.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Vargas, Robert, Kayla Preito-Hodge, and Jeremy Christofferson. 2019. “Digital Vulnerability: The Unequal Risk of E-Contact with the Criminal Justice System.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 71–88. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.04. We thank Ariel Azar and Anil Sindhwani for research assistance on this project, as well as Dan Gillion, Jothie Rajah, the American Bar Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the anonymous reviewers for comments and critiques on earlier components of this article. Direct correspondence to: Robert Vargas at robvargas{at}uchicago.edu, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.