Access to quasi-public spaces, restaurants and cafes for example, isn’t always equal in America, particularly for Black people and other people of color. One such example of this is the infamous 2018 incident in Philadelphia when two Black men waiting at Starbucks for an acquaintance were arrested for loitering. The national outcry over their biased and unjust treatment led to a change in Starbucks’ corporate policy. It also begs the question: How often does this kind of incident happen around the country, and what implications does it have?
A new study from the Annenberg School for Communication, published in the Journal of Communication, investigates the ways that institutions control who has access to WiFi, and the findings indicate that quality-of-life policing—the report and/or arrest of individuals engaged in nonviolent offenses such as loitering, noise violations, and public intoxication—is used by powerful institutions and privileged people to keep those with less privilege, including people of color, from accessing resources like the internet.
The inspiration for the study came from a story Annenberg professor Julia Ticona heard while interviewing gig workers for her forthcoming book, “Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age.” One of her interviewees, a twenty-year-old Black man named Alex, had a Starbucks manager threaten to call the police on him because he was using an outlet and the internet.
“I was so frustrated for him personally,” says Ticona. “And I was also frustrated that we so often talk about the digital divide as a matter of people not being able to afford access, entirely omitting from the discussion that people are actively being threatened for using the internet.”
Ticona shared her frustration with Annenberg professor Yphtach Lelkes and doctoral candidate Tian Yang, and the three scholars joined forces to develop a method for investigating if and how institutions are policing access to the internet.
“We were excited to be able to establish a causal relationship between institutional dynamics and their outcomes in perpetuating social inequalities,” says Yang. “To do this, we applied methods used in economics and other fields to develop a way to analyze the data for answers to our questions.”
This story is by Ashton Yount. Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.
