Policing and Carcerality in Public Libraries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Policing in libraries poses a significant barrier to access for many potential patrons—and yet, much of the literature on library security advocates for strong security measures without regard for the safety and wellbeing of patrons and staff who are BIPOC, LGBTQ2SIA+, disabled, and unhoused. Considerable lived experience and research shows that police disproportionately target those whose identities deviate from the norm, but in a society with so many diverse experiences, identities, and relationships to power and authority, we are obligated as socially conscious library workers to consider how our relationships to policing and security in the library affect all peoples. To do so, we draw on an intersectional abolitionist praxis that seeks to deconstruct the carceral and penal systems omnipresent in our society. After exploring some of the security measures taken by public libraries that enable the carceral state, we propose alternative measures that can be taken through the acronym-based catchphrase to encourage library workers of all types to give greater consideration to the ramifications of involving police in difficult patron interactions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".