Officer Matt McPhail happened to be at his desk when the first alert went off.
A Nissan sedan had crossed the intersection of San Juan and Truxel where the Sacramento police had just placed one of two custom-built surveillance cameras. The system ID’d the vehicle as stolen.
“I said, ‘Hey, if anybody’s in the area, you know, keep an eye out for this car,’ ” recalls Mr. McPhail, a public information officer for the department. “And a helicopter was in the area and some officers went by and found it.”
That was 2014. The city has since installed 32 police observation devices, or PODs. Now Sacramento —like New York, Houston, Miami, St. Louis, and other cities before it— is looking at the next step: the launch in October of a “real-time crime center,” a central location from which officers could monitor all their existing surveillance technologies, PODs included.
The idea is that consolidating information about criminal activity —from stalking complaints to potential lone wolf terrorist attacks— would make law enforcement more effective at investigating and perhaps preventing some incidents. The process would also promote accountability and transparency at a time of rising tension between police and the black community, providing evidence of both police and suspect behavior during tense encounters, proponents say.
But the technology raises big privacy issues. Already concerned about PODs, privacy advocates are troubled by the prospect of centralizing law-enforcement data, especially in a post-9/11 world where data is being shared more widely across federal, state, and local lines. The technology is already causing a populist backlash.
“The theory of policing has changed,” says Rebecca Lonergan, a University of Southern California law professor who spent 16 years prosecuting public corruption and national security cases for the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. “There’s an understanding now that we really need to centralize all of our information.”
Protection for large gatherings
McPhail is usually off on Fridays, but he clocked in the day after Micah Xavier Johnson shot and killed five police officers in Dallas last month.
That same day, McPhail explained how the city’s new crime center would help prevent future tragedies in large public gatherings. The department is planning to install 10 new cameras at the city’s Golden 1 Center arena. The crime center itself will have banks of state-of-the-art screens showing live, high-definition video feeds of major traffic and transportation sites, as well as trained personnel who can provide real-time information to officers in the field and use data analysis tools to interpret any data being collected.
“It’s not a replacement for old-fashioned police work,” McPhail says. But “this is kind of like a natural progression … of how we do business, the questions we would ask. It’s like the first bread crumb along a trail where at least our investigators know where to start looking.”
It’s called predictive policing, and law enforcement agencies in other cities are already making it happen. In New York City, home to the oldest and arguably most sophisticated real-time crime center in the country, police can use surveillance and data analysis technology to identify suspected criminals or terrorists based on anything from a birthmark to a limp.
The idea is that people who have a record get their identifying marks loaded into a database. So if police need to identify someone they see, they can type in the visible characteristics and then get that person’s name and information.
With terrorism, “it’s so hard to find those few [radicals] that really are serious about it,” says Professor Lonergan at USC. “The only way you find them is by doing the kind of data collection and data mining that we’re talking about.”
The technology can also be used for more routine policing, such as addressing stalking claims. If complainants have a license plate number and are able to give at least three places where they might have seen the stalker, the POD system can be queried to see if the vehicle was there, McPhail says.
“Now I might have a stronger case to substantiate a stalking claim in advance of something potentially much more serious happening to our victim,” he says. “And it has been used to that effect.”
More policing not the answer?
For some privacy and civil liberties advocates, such predictive strategies in routine police work is a problem, not a solution.
“There’s a shift in the primary modality of policing, where it’s not just the old investigating methods being employed, but preemptive policing based on hunches,” says Hamid Khan, a coordinator with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an alliance of community groups that aims to prevent undue surveillance of marginalized communities in Los Angeles. “It’s become part of a larger architecture of surveillance.”
He and other critics say that sort of predictive policing reinforces racial profiling and violates civil liberties, with little accountability on the part of the officers who employ such methods. Worse, the strategy fails to address the underlying reasons for which people often commit crimes.
“[T]he deepest flaw in the logic of predictive policing is the assumption that … what the model predicts is the need for policing, as opposed to the need for any other less coercive social tools to deal with the trauma of economic distress, family dislocation, mental illness, environmental stress and racial discrimination that often masquerade as criminal behavior,” writes Aderson Francois, a professor of law at Howard University in Washington, in an op-ed for The New York Times.
Law enforcement should stay out of the surveillance and data collection business, critics say – at least, until lawmakers are able to develop clear policies that regulate their use.
“Technology can be liberating or it can be a tool for control,” notes Shahid Buttar, director of grassroots advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties nonprofit based in San Francisco. Conscientiously developing and implementing policy to govern that technology and its use, he says, could spell the difference between the two.
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About The Author
Jessica Mendoza
Staff writer
Christian Science Monitor