Dallas Police and Deep Ellum Businesses to Share Surveillance Tapes
By Byron LaMasters
The Dallas Morning News reports:
If you're thinking about stirring up trouble on the streets of Deep Ellum this New Year's Eve, think twice: You're being watched.
Dallas police will be able to monitor crowds from 16 cameras on the roofs of three businesses in Deep Ellum: the Gypsy Tea Room, Club Clearview and Digital Strata. [...]
The businesses and police will share the footage via the Internet. Although live activity can be monitored, police said they won't be watching it like a reality show.
"The intent is not just to provide real-time video images but to provide a history of what happened," Chief David Kunkle said. "This is part of making the city of Dallas safer."
Virtual Surveillance of Plano donated about $20,000 worth of equipment and services for the pilot project. The cameras will remain in place indefinitely.
Bad idea on several levels. I don't like the idea of a public/private partnership when it comes to law enforcement as they have two very different motivations - one to keep the public safe, and the other to make a profit. Putting surveillance videos on the internet leaves it wide open to all sorts of problems, and who knows what the motivation of the company donating everything for the project. Yes, I know crime is high in many parts of Dallas, and I'm all for trying innovative ideas, but just check out Grits for Breakfast if you can't think of the potential problems here:
Police shouldn't share surveillance data with private entities, much less transmit that data blithely over the Internet, but that's what happening in Dallas. Once private businesses get the tapes, they can do what they want with them. It really doesn't seem like Chief Kunkle has thought the whole thing through.
In other words, if young women celebrating Mardi Gras in Deep Ellum decide to flash the crowd, the videotape could be sold for use on Girls Gone Wild. They might even get some good shots. After all, the donor company touts its system's zoom and tracking capabilities. A British study found that one out of ten women were targeted by male surveillance camera operators for voyeuristic purposes, and steamy excerpts from British police surveillance tapes have wound up in the hands of B filmmakers, who profiteered off of them.
For a whole lot more, read more Grits and Talk Left.
Posted by Byron LaMasters at December 30, 2004 07:57 PM
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What bothers me most about 24/7/365 video surveillance, even in public, isn't the opportunity for voyeurism so much as the fact that it creates an infrastructure which could easily be used to violate our civil rights, probably sooner than we think.
For example, most of us commit minor violations, like littering or driving without a seatbelt, at least on occasion, both because the offenses are very minor and because the odds of being caught are so slim. But not anymore, at least not in Deep Ellum! Now we can, at least in theory, catch everyone who carelessly tosses a cigarette butt onto the street, every seat belt scofflaw, etc.
Of course, they're not going to do that. But if the police "have it in" for someone who lives, or at least frequents, the Deep Ellum neighborhood, they can now go fishing through the archives for some such minor offense, and use the footage as a basis for arrest or harassment.
In other words, this gives the police the means to make life very difficult for anyone they want to: non-whites, people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, whatever.
