From COINTELPRO to Snapchat, Police Surveillance of Black People Is More Pervasive Than Ever

The criminalization of Black spaces in America is not new. From the constant monitoring of enslaved Black people to the surveillance of the Black Lives Matter movement, starting with the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, law enforcement agencies have long monitored Black people in activist and social spaces under the guise of maintaining order. But history has shown that these infiltrations often do more than just monitor — they amount to racial profiling and can lead to wrongful arrests and convictions. 

This troubling issue was particularly evident in Commonwealth v. Dilworth, a Massachusetts case in which police and other system actors attempted to avoid transparency and accountability for suspected racial profiling.   

In the fall of 2017, Richard Dilworth Jr. unwittingly accepted a friend request from an undercover Boston police officer on Snapchat. Through this connection, the officer — who was assigned to the Youth Violence Strike Force (otherwise known as the YVSF gang unit) — accessed private posts allegedly showing Mr. Dilworth with firearms. As a result of this surveillance, he was arrested in January 2018 on gun charges. After his release, police claimed he again posted a video of himself holding what appeared to be a firearm, which resulted in a second arrest in May 2018 on similar charges.

In trial court, Mr. Dilworth filed multiple motions, seeking information regarding the Boston Police Department’s use of social media monitoring. He argued that his arrests were not coincidental but part of a broader pattern of racially biased surveillance that targeted Black people. In support of his motions, Mr. Dilworth submitted an affidavit from his attorney, whose research revealed at least 20 similar cases in which police targeted people via Snapchat. Of those cases, 85 percent involved Black people, 15 percent involved Hispanic people, and none involved white people. Prosecutors, however, resisted providing information about their surveillance, citing concerns that doing so would compromise both ongoing investigations and confidential informants — despite the fact that officers could simply make decoy accounts at any time. In fact, the prosecution went so far as to file a notice stating their refusal to comply with the trial judge’s order to disclose information, prompting the trial judge to   dismiss Mr. Dilworth’s charges.

Prosecutors then appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), arguing that, in addition to their confidentiality concerns, state case law requiring police to disclose information potentially revealing racially biased investigative tactics did not apply to online investigations. The Innocence Project, in partnership with the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union and the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, also co-filed an amicus brief with the court, emphasizing the racial disparities in social media surveillance and advocating for standards governing police use of surveillance tactics.