The Coloniality of Data: Police Databases and the Rationalization of Surveillance from Colonial Vietnam to the Modern Carceral State

Tracing the early adoption of computer gang databases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s to the deployment of computationally-assisted surveillance during the Vietnam War, this paper uses a genealogical approach to compare surveillance technologies developed across the arc of colonial racial capitalism-from the Age of Imperialism through the Cold War and into the historical present. Specifically analyzing technologies displayed at the 1902-03 Hanoi Exposition in French Indochina and the 1964-65 New York World's Fair during the Cold War, it positions Southeast Asia is an important case because much of the primary architecture for the development of the modern American surveillance state historically arose from attempts to manage anti-imperial resistance across the decolonizing Pacific. The analysis connects how early anthropometric measurement and recordkeeping practices under French colonial rule transformed through the widespread adoption of computational tools for postwar technocratic planning during the American War in Vietnam, demonstrating a rationalization of surveillance over time as economies of accumulation and disposal interacted with technological innovations in bureaucratic management to maximize means-end, state-market efficiencies. Ultimately the analysis offers the concept of the coloniality of data, showing how global interpellations of the locatable criminal body in local, national, and international databases continue to constitute data itself as a rationalized-and increasingly automated-technology of imperial power.