Being watchful
This week the Coalition for Police Transparency and Accountability (CPTA) and Urban Praxis joined with other community groups to discuss police surveillance in Detroit. People gathered to share information and ideas about the extent and effectiveness of surveillance techniques used by the Detroit Police.
Several key ideas emerged:
1. Detroit has a wide array of surveillance technologies. These technologies are implemented without consideration of their impact on people.
2. The purchases of new technologies are outstripping our policies to protect people and their basic rights.
3. Citizen initiated efforts to control the use of this technology have been met with forceful resistance by the Detroit Police Department, the Mayor, the majority of the City Council, and big business interests.
4. The Detroit Police Department resists any effort to monitor their actions. They are all for technologies that enable the police to control us, but not policies that allow us to monitor them. For example, the DPD continues to resist efforts to make the release of body worn camera images routine, as Chicago does.
The meeting opened with the question of what technologies do we notice in our neighborhoods and how do they make us feel? Within seconds people identified drones, facial recognition technology, blue boxes, license plate readers, traffic cameras, green lights, shot spotters, dumping cameras, helicopters, heat sensing vans, social media tracking, private business cameras, cell phone tracking, and security devices on homes from ring doorbells to video cameras, encouraged by big business in the name of safety. The words people used to describe how this array of technologies made them feel were “violated,” “creepy,” “angry,” “infuriated,” “scared,” “spied on,” and “weird.” People wondered, “Where can I be and not feel watched?” No one felt these devices made them safe.
People recognized that there is nothing new in police surveillance of the African American and radical communities. But what is new are the kinds of technologies available for this surveillance. Their capacity to intrude, monitor and ultimately control our lives has expanded vastly. A recent study of the extensive forms of technology being employed today concluded:
If anything today is different from historical Black experiences with government surveillance, it’s that 21st century technology advances have made the practice far easier and more widespread. What was once limited to human, street-level surveillance or wiretaps has expanded to include Black people’s online activities. From social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to content-sharing sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify, law enforcement can watch and listen to whole communities, all from the comfort of their removed, secure offices. As a result, street gang police units and other intelligence-gathering entities have moved much of their policing online. Today, law enforcement spends substantial resources monitoring the online conversations, activities, and networks of young Black and Latino men, looking for evidence of crimes, sometimes before any crime or real threat has occurred.
At the gathering people discussed the lack of policy controls on any of these technologies. Though it is widely recognized that these technologies are used disproportionately against communities of color and political dissenters, safeguards for the public are virtually nonexistent. This is in part due to the complexities of the technologies adopted, but it is also due to the refusal of the police to take seriously the constitutional rights of the public. Moreover, it reflects the ease with which the police and mayor manipulate the bodies charged with oversight of these purchases. The Board of Police Commissioners and the City Council serve as little more than a rubber stamp for whatever new gadget comes along.
The case of the use of facial recognition technologies is illustrative of this. Most people at the gathering were familiar with the egregious cases of misidentification of individuals due to the use of facial recognition technology. It took a lawsuit by Robert Williams, the victim of a false arrest, and the ACLU to get guidelines in place. Now members of the Police Department and BOPC are claiming that there are strong controls, reflective of their concerns for the citizens. Nothing could be further from the truth as the false arrest of Isoke Robinson, based on the misuse of license plate readers, revealed recently.
You can view the presentation from the meeting here. Over the next several months CPTA will be joining Urban Praxis and their partners in exploring what we can do to create real community safety as we demand greater transparency and accountability. These are urgent questions for all of us.