The department disseminated clear images and made an arrest within a few days, Michael Harrison, the New Orleans police superintendent, told privacy expert Julia Angwin in a panel discussion on the future of policing.
“That’s how we are able to go to surviving victims or families of victims and tell them, ‘Yes, justice is served,'” Harrison told Angwin.
Angwin, an editor at The Markup, a news site focused on technology’s societal impact, conceded that “everyone is going to be surveilled” but raised concerns about civil liberties and the use of cameras and their oversight. Harrison, who is usually reserved, was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about his force’s new tool. “Any sheriff or law enforcement executive who does not have this is living in the Dark Ages and working far behind the times.”
Harrison said the city’s 300 cameras were placed on public poles on public streets and that staff members from the city’s Real Time Crime Monitoring Center tapped into the cameras’ live feed only when prompted by a 911 call reporting crime in a one-mile radius. He calls it a “crime-fighting tool,” not surveillance.
He said that residents and businesses were now able to buy their own cameras and that they could opt into use by the center with hopes of using images to capture not only gunmen but also petty criminals who deal drugs or dump trash illegally. “Who doesn’t want to identify the murderer?” Angwin asked. “But what about the protester, the dumper?”
Research conducted in surveillance-heavy European cities shows that such cameras don’t deter crime, she said. “It often displaces crime, so it can move it to another area of the city, and can help in solving crimes.” Harrison nodded. During the year that the cameras have been active, he’s already seen violent-crime hot spots shift. “I would agree that it doesn’t always deter crime, but sometimes displaces it,” he said.
Harrison said that because the New Orleans Police Department was under a federal consent decree, his staff had been working with the decree’s monitor to create and carry out policies that ensured that camera images could be uploaded only to a secure police-evidence cloud, not downloaded by an operator. The decree very specifically limits monitoring to local officials and precludes sharing surveillance with immigration officials, he said; federal law enforcement partners have to request access for specific crimes that have been committed.
To start, the images can be viewed only from a computer screen in the monitoring center when police dispatchers receive a 911 call, he said. “And then we’re monitoring the people who are monitoring to make that sure they’re not abusing that.”
“What you’re describing, of how it turns on once there’s an incident, is actually something we know already in policing — it’s called ‘the probable-cause standard, right?'” Angwin said. “But what is the civilian oversight or the judicial oversight to make sure that’s really true?”
Also, Angwin asked, did everyone in New Orleans know how to deal with images generated by the camera system? “We have a clear system in the offline world,” she said. Probable cause is clearly defined in court, for instance. “And we know what happens afterward: how to challenge that warrant in court.”
Dealing with legal matters generated from online images is much more murky, she said. “This is a situation where it’s totally outside of those rules, right? And so I think what we face as a society is building that set of rules.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.