Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. — Yoda
Below are some good reasons to oppose Police-operated Surveillance Cameras, especially when equipped with AI Face Search and connected to the Internet and Cloud. Feel free to use these when you Take Action.
Thought experiment: What if town residents networked together all their own private cameras (e.g. Ring or Nest), to watch cars go by on the street. We'll use AI to notice each squad car, and its license plate. We'll make a public website and app showing where each squad car is at all times, on a map. With history, too.
We can also point cameras at the police station -- not a place of residence -- to monitor the coming and going of all officers and their personal cars. Put that on the app, too, so we know when each officer is at the station. Would police be OK with this?
Thought experiment: Make a public website with all the Verkada feeds, including the 30-day retention, face search, and AI clothing search features. Do you still think it's OK for the cameras to get hacked?
Surveillance camera advocates say you have no expectation of privacy in public -- a camera is no different than an officer watching from the sidewalk.
This is crazy: officers don't have 24x7 recording, night vision, telephoto lenses, or the ability to watch from headquarters (or anywhere, with internet access). And they cost 100x more. But the real problem is the network effects when many cameras are connected together.
When you connect a lot of cameras together, especially with AI, the capability emerges to track people's location. The courts have held that location tracking does need a warrant, but they haven't made the connection yet to surveillance cameras, because the network effects are new.
Journalist Kate Kaye recently told the following story to Portland group Techno Activism 3rd Mondays.
Surveillance cameras are now easily and frequently connected to Federal and Regional Law enforcement Fusion Centers. This is often done quietly. Say your town passes an ordinance to become a Sanctuary City like South Orange, and/or ban face recognition (like San Francisco). The Fusion Center isn't bound by these rules. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can and has run face recognition on the video to find undocumented immigrants, who are then arrested and deported.
Many law enforcement agencies, especially fusion centers, have used surveillance and face recognition to monitor political protests, and build dossiers about activists exercising First Amendment rights.
Some folks, including police themselves, want more police power. Others want more Civil Liberties. How do we strike the balance?
We have a status quo balance to start with. Police need to justify, using data about sustained conditions in South Orange, why the balance needs to shift. Crime rates in South Orange are dropping.
If we truly need more cameras, let's choose them to meet police needs (as approved for balance), but maximizing civil liberties protections. With policies, yes, but also by choosing less powerful technology. They don't need Cloud, Face Match and other AI, etc. Maplewood PD doesn't have these things.
Surveillance cameras don't actually reduce violent crime, and have only a modest affect on property crime. Police want them to help investigate and prosecute, aka "clear" incidents. But they were able to investigate and prosecute before, without these tools.
It's a classis case of the modern management obsession with tracking a variable and optimizing it. A good practice, if you pick the right variable. Crime stats plot the incidence and clearance of crime on the same chart, with the same importance. Yes, clearance is part of the police's job, but does it really make us safer? Is it worth giving up civil liberties for easier investigations?
Put stuff in writing. Police statement to Village Green says, "it's not surveillance, we won't look at video in real time. We only want this for traffic accidents and major crime." Why then is there a monitoring station at the dispatch desk? Apparently, Maplewood's system is unable to review video before a 10 minute delay. What about nuisance crimes, and teens in parks at night?
Why does a single surveillance camera go up before every officer has body cameras? Waiting for state funding is no excuse: we had the money for Verkada. As of 12 October 2020 when we passed the Verkada ordinance, 45% of NJ law enforcement agencies had body cameras. In Essex County, it’s 51.9% (14 of 27 agencies). Why is South Orange below average?
Town and PD says they don't intend any of the abuses we worry about.
Well, maybe. We haven't seen much respect or awareness of civil liberties issues, so far -- for example, buying surveillance cameras before body cameras, and choosing Verkada. I actually did trust them, until they did this. But fine, let's say we trust them. Problem is, I can't trust the the next bunch of town leaders and next crop of police, because I haven't met them yet.
Remember Trump, and how in only four years, he moved our country toward authoritarianism.
Why not make it easier to police minor crimes or nuisance behavior?
South Orange aspires to be ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to racial justice. But we’re far from perfect. More importantly, we're connected to a wider world — and criminal justice system — that have a long way to go before they deliver fair outcomes for people of color, low-income communities, and other disadvantaged groups.
We don’t want to create even more interactions between police and these over-policed communities. Those interactions are one consequence of surveillance. Police can still prosecute crime where it matters. It just takes more work, same as before we had surveillance technology.
Another problem is Face Recognition. Even if it worked perfectly, it raises concerns around consent, mass surveillance, location privacy, chilling first amendment-protected protests, etc. But it sometimes makes errors on white faces, and much more often on dark-skinned faces, which are under-represented in AI training data. This leads to bad outcomes. Verkada's Face Match system has all these issues. Then, because people of color are over-represented in law enforcement databases, face recognition perpetuates systemic bias, instead of being the color-blind technology you’d hope for. Injustice past begets injustice future. That's why it's banned in Boston, San Francisco, several other cities, and the entire state of Maine.
Let's get cameras with no AI, or maybe no cameras period.
Trustees say that the CPC committee can't fill an oversight role. And they're right: CPC is there to build trust and dialog between community and police, which is at least as important as oversight. Also, the best part of CPC is that it has members who are police officers. So it's not the right place for oversight.
But then, what is? Our small town naturally has a chummy relationship with its Police Department, which is good in many ways. They have to work together to keep the town safe, especially in emergencies. But, it's not best practice for arms-length supervision.
First, we offer love to Hawa Fofana and her family. While we can’t imagine what they are going through, we feel the loss of Moussa as an attack on our own children, and indeed on everyone in Maplewood and South Orange. We echo the call of Justice for Moussa, and encourage donations to the family and reward fund. Call in tips to 877-TIPS-4EC.
It is appropriate to respond with action to prevent violence. At the same time, we must try to not respond emotionally when making long-term decisions. Homicides are not caused by freedom and privacy. We must preserve these liberties for all our children, even as we seek justice. History shows that privacy is eroded during crises, often irrevocably.
We should all work to keep guns out of the hands of youth, and push illegal guns out of our towns. We can discuss legal guns, too, which are on the rise. Let’s continue to increase mental health supports, anti-violence efforts, and peaceful conflict resolution in our schools and community.
The school district’s facilities plan allocates $5.3 million to security, so we don’t doubt there will be security increases at Underhill Field. But we won’t be able to stop teens from gathering alone at night, nor should we. They deserve to be able to lie in the dark and look up at the stars, contemplating the universe.
There are already more surveillance cameras at Underhill Field than anywhere else in SOMA. They obviously couldn’t prevent this tragedy. We know from research that surveillance cameras don’t prevent or even deter violent crime. It’s unclear yet what role they’ll play in apprehending a suspect. While we all crave news of the investigation, prosecutors will likely limit detail until evidence is presented in court, to maximize chances for conviction. We do know that cameras don’t need any AI, Face Recognition, Internet, or real-time video, to help investigate a homicide or to bring Justice for Moussa.
In investigations like this, detectives can put in the work to get video from cameras, and review it. What we cannot allow is push-button remote access and AI-assisted search on any camera in town. That is not compatible with the free society that our youth deserve.