Across the United States, cities are spending a larger share of the money at their disposal buying and deploying surveillance technology. From cameras to A.I.–enhanced microphones, and from automated license plate readers to drones and robots, cities are responding to cries for more safety with security theater. This might lead to a few extra arrests, but it does little to create sustainable safety. Forcing residents in neighborhoods with higher crime rates to live under constant, all-seeing digital scrutiny will neither make people safer from the systematic harms they face, including police violence, nor patch up their rocky relationship with the police who are sworn to protect and serve them.

From at least the advent of fingerprint analysis, police work has trended to rely more on technology and less on community involvement—a shift that has signaled a decreasing reliance on witnesses and people who know community residents well. That problem has only been exacerbated with the increasing prevalence of CCTV cameras in the past 50 years; detectives have had less incentive to collaborate with people in a community to identify a suspect when any doorbell camera can do it for them. Similarly, why would police encourage the arduous task of organically organizing a community around violence prevention when they can send off a warrant to a tech company and get the geolocation of every single cellphone on the block?

Yes, people who live in communities that are affected by crime and constant policing may be reluctant to give their time and emotional energy to testifying or cooperating with police—but there are several reasons for that. In an era when a Black woman can be shot dead in her own home by the officers she called because she was afraid, is there really any surprise that police have a hard time getting community cooperation? Especially when there is no guarantee that the officer asking for a statement isn’t someone who has been fired from a dozen other police departments for excessive force. That is not a problem that can, or should, be fixed merely by adding more cameras.

Advertisement

This divide between the community and those sworn to protect it creates a feedback loop in which police departments find it much easier to put up a ton of cameras and license plate readers rather than invest in building trust and cooperation. And they can afford to—they have a tremendous amount of money to spend on tech from private donors, police foundations, the federal government, and an increasingly large share of city budgets.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

People want safety; they don’t necessarily want more policing and surveillance. Surveillance is just the only solution politicians often give when citizens demand more safety, so people take what they can get.

And there is not much evidence that this mass of entwined surveillance infrastructure actually lowers crime rates or creates more feelings of safety—in part because so many statistics out there about the effectiveness of this technology are created by companies who sell cameras. They might secure one-off convictions—but drop crime rates across a community or town? Unlikely.

Advertisement

One could point to cities across the world with lower violent crime rates than the United States, like London, where CCTV camera surveillance is ubiquitous. But let’s be honest: London has many more differences from American cities than just cameras. For one thing, it’s pretty hard to buy a gun in the U.K. For another, England has a social safety net, free health care, and comparatively more-robust public housing programs—the lack of which the U.S. government has identified as among the root causes of crime, urban inequality, and civic unrest since the 1960s.

Simply put: There are other things we should spend money on as a society if we want to sustainably increase safety for all.

Advertisement Advertisement

The harm of surveillance should not be waved away as a mere “trade-off,” as if privacy and safety are mutually exclusive. There are many factors that contribute to feeling safe in a neighborhood—lighting, pedestrians, open bars and restaurants—that have nothing to do with surveillance. And yet we are frequently asked to write off constant surveillance as a necessary inconvenience. It’s more than that. U.S. history is filled with the harms that surveillance has wrought—from the FBI’s illegal surveillance, disruption, and blackmail of the Civil Rights Movement under J. Edgar Hoover, to the surveillance of Muslims after 9/11, to our current crisis of omnipresent surveillance in the criminalization of abortion. All these moments were enabled by the bipartisan buildup of surveillance capabilities at the local, state, and federal levels.

Advertisement Advertisement

Expanded surveillance gives police greater opportunities to abuse their power and exploit people in poor neighborhoods. Under constant surveillance, every tiny infraction or misdemeanor becomes actionable. And when only some neighborhoods are surveilled, the vulnerability to police intervention is not evenly dispersed; people can jaywalk or litter carefree in one area while those in another can’t for fear of ubiquitous police. Let’s not forget one of the lessons of Ferguson: Cities too often use mass ticketing as a way to solve municipal budget shortfalls. If a city needs ticket revenue, and only some neighborhoods have mass amounts of surveillance, it’s safe to assume we know which neighborhood has historically borne the brunt of those citations and will continue to do so.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

Can we really trust police to use this power exclusively to track down suspects related to the most violent offenses? After all, so many surveillance devices—from drones to cell-site simulators—have been introduced as necessary tools in extreme circumstances, only to slowly seep into everyday procedure. It’s for this reason that you see the New York City Police Department counterterrorism division monitoring turnstile-hoppers on the subway system.

Related From Slate

Austin Sarat

He Was in Prison for 48 Years for a Crime He Didn’t Commit. His Restitution Is Appalling.

Read More

In short: We advocate weariness against police surveillance because we’re worried not just about a new COINTELPRO. We’re also worried about a digital version of broken-windows policing: a high-tech world where law enforcement can maximize penalties for minor offenses without ultimately making communities significantly safer.

Advertisement

Cities have already been adding layers upon layers of surveillance to hyperpoliced communities for years, yet gun violence tends to ebb and flow for other reasons: the accessibility of firearms, the underfunding of public programs, a lack of economic opportunity, and other environmental and social factors.

Popular in News & Politics

1. Kamala Harris May Finally Be the Opponent That Makes Donald Trump Fully Lose It
2. So Is Donald Trump Jr. Cursed, or What?
3. A Global Problem Is Preventing the Wars in Ukraine and Gaza From Coming to an End
4. The Trump and Harris Campaigns Are Pivoting to a New Skirmish

No one wants to live in a community terrorized by gun violence, and the government needs to do more to address it. At some point, we have to ask ourselves: When can we try another solution to this problem that is not policing and surveillance? When 50–60 percent of a city’s budget goes to policing and there are enough cameras to survey every street, what will the surveillance proponents advocate for next when gun violence still exists?

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

There are so many other, more innovative ways that cities can attempt to curb violence in communities—methods that have not already been tried over and over again. Increased funding is yielding exciting results for programs focusing on community-based violence-interruption programs. Using a public health approach, these strategies proactively engage with those believed to be most at risk of gun violence—rather than wait to retroactively penalize them with surveillance-camera footage.

This new model of safety doesn’t involve constant surveillance and the exaggerated digital omnipresence of police. Equating surveillance with safety considers only a fraction of what “safety” for everyone looks like. You cannot protect people from harm if part of what you offer them is a different kind of harm.

Tweet Share Share Comment

• Cities
• Criminal Justice
• Government Surveillance