Fresno Debates Video Surveillance

Fresno Debates Video Surveillance
By Mike Rhodes

Are you willing to trade your privacy and civil liberties for a plan that some say will increase public safety? The Fresno Police Department has a proposal before the City Council that would vastly increase video surveillance. They say that recording your movements as you travel around town will make Fresno a safer place to live. To their credit, both the FPD and our elected officials have asked for public input before implementing this policy that would forever change the political and social landscape of this community.

The vision driving this proposal is the desire to utilize technology that will reduce crime, increase public safety, and solve crimes. The initial proposal would place approximately 50 cameras in public areas like the Tower District, downtown, and public parks. In the future, several hundred cameras would be located throughout the community. Captain Al Maroney, who presented the plan to the City Council, says the cameras will stream video back to a central location where the images will be saved and used as evidence if a crime occurs.

Last week I sat in Captain Maroney’s office and watched a live video stream from Roeding Park. We were watching the Belmont entrance and could zoom in on a blade of grass 200 feet away. While I don’t think the FPD has any nefarious purpose in mind for this video equipment, I do have my concerns.

Video surveillance in Fresno is already a proved failure. The installation of dozens of video cameras at busy intersections throughout the community were supposed to be used to issue tickets to motorists running red lights and serve as a deterrent so drivers would think twice about their driving practices. The cameras were expected to catch about 51,000 violators a year and generate $13.8 million in fines. After several years of spending our tax dollars on this boondoggle, the cameras are unused, and the project has been abandoned. Those cameras now sit as a monument to the failure of video surveillance.

In his presentation before the City Council Captain Maroney said video surveillance has been used in Europe since 1961 to "reduce or deter crime." But, recent studies have found that this assertion is simply not true. A 2005 British study showed video surveillance didn’t reduce crime or make people feel safer. A BBC article about that study is available here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/4294693.stm . An earlier study (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2192911.stm ) also showed that video surveillance is "not a crime deterrent." In reality, even the FPD does not plan to use the equipment to prevent crime. Maroney says they are not going to have someone constantly watching the cameras looking for crimes in progress.

If the purpose of the equipment is not to reduce crime, then the FPD will certainly have guidelines and regulations to control who has access to the video being taken, right? I asked Maroney about what rules will be in place to prevent abuse. What will stop a bored employee from stalking women with the video surveillance equipment? What will happen when the technology advances and the FPD has the ability to look for guns or a bomb under a person’s clothes? What else will they be looking at under our clothes? As recently as last Friday, the FPD could show me no guidelines or rules that they are proposing to prevent these abuses. If they want this equipment, they will have to do better than "trust us" when asked about this issue.

The biggest concern I have about the use of this technology is the effect it will have on our civil liberties. When you know that anywhere you go, you are being watched by armed government agents, you might act differently or be more self conscious. You also might decide that it is best not to be seen in public reading controversial books or periodicals. Benjamin Franklin wrote "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

I find myself in agreement with Benjamin Franklin and The Fresno Bee editorial of January 12 that said this video technology has "Too high a price - video policing poses a potential hazard to our civil liberties." Whatever benefits we are being told might exist are far out weighed by the threat to our civil liberties, the inability of the technology to prevent crime, and the very real threat posed by employees who could misuse the system for their own purposes.

We need to tell our City Council representative, loud and clear, to reject this proposal.