How one Mass city watches the watchers, and how others should follow suit
On February 2, 2009, the Cambridge City Council voted in unanimous opposition to the installation of eight Department of Homeland Security cameras at major intersections on the basis that “the potential threats to invasion of privacy and individual civil liberties outweigh the current benefits” of accepting the DHS funds. While six such cameras were installed all the same, the council and a vocal citizenry has since successfully opposed their activation.
At a follow-up meeting earlier this month, all nine Cambridge councilors reaffirmed their position: the cameras must remain off until police prove beyond doubt that their department has the capacity to balance investigative methods with civil liberties.
Such aggressive civilian oversight of law enforcement should serve as a model not only for the Boston region, but for the whole country.
Since 9-11, police chiefs, sheriffs, and commissioners have had an open invitation to request any range of surveillance and tactical gear from federal coffers, often without accountability checks to ensure that deployment squares with the Bill of Rights. Between DHS, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, local overseers can secure every conceivable toy that they could ever covet without spending a dime of their own. From drones, to armored vehicles, to Long Range Acoustic Devices, which are essentially giant human dog whistles, it’s a veritable buffet via federal grants.
Since these checks are written by the feds, such arrangements are often executed without city councils or administrations being notified, much less being asked for permission–in Seattle, for example, police saw fit to buy not one but two surveillance drones using $80,000 in DHS funding. The chief there bought his toys in 2010, but didn’t notify the city council for two years, and only after a reporter’s Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a list of drone licensees. Upon the discovery and mounting pressure, the Seattle mayor subsequently ordered the department to return its drones to the manufacturer.
Closer to home, the same grant that bankrolled Cambridge’s security cameras also paid for similar equipment installations in all nine communities that are part of the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region alliance.
Each year, police and emergency responders in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere, Somerville, and Winthrop submit their wish lists to MBHSR, from which regional DHS representatives award funds for software, artillery, and training. The big prize this year appears to be Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology, with 21 of the controversial scanners distributed across MBHSR communities, and three going to every department save for Boston and Brookline.
ALPR devices compare passing plates against flagged vehicles, then tag those hits (regardless of whether they’re matches, typically) to a GPS reading of where each vehicle was spotted. Since they were deployed with minimal public input across Massachusetts, the majority of Commonwealth police departments have yet to enact ALPR policies specifying: how long plate scans and location data can be stored; how investigators can use the sensitive information; who can access the data; whether it can be shared with other agencies. With the potential for civil liberties violations so apparent, state legislators are shy to even endorse minimal restrictions on ALPR.
The Cambridge City Council took a different approach. Rather than ceding oversight and allowing cops to deploy whatever equipment they can muster, councilors actually asked the public to weigh-in. Despite vigorous arguments from police that switching on the cameras would improve their situational awareness and investigative capacity, councilors and citizens alike remained wary of the draft policy’s loopholes–particularly a provision that additional cameras could be installed with mere notification to the City Council (rather than via approval from the body).
This latest vote ought to jolt legislatures nationwide, or at least across the Bay State, into remembering that law enforcement is a function of government, and a critical one, but not a force unto itself. Unilateral moves like installing cameras or collecting vehicle and cell phone location data have become the terrifying norm, and civilian officials need to reassert oversight as a proactive measure, as opposed to a reactive one.
In Cambridge, elected officials have goaded public safety servants back to their role: to protect the people, on their terms.