Surveillance won’t make us safer, but it will make someone richer
Like most parents with young children, we have a baby monitor with a camera in our kid’s room. At first, it was used to make sure she was still breathing, but now it’s mostly used to make sure she’s “following the rules” during bed time. In many ways, all surveillance is sold to us as some tool of safety, but in the end it’s about control (and who can make money from it).
While the City continues to struggle financially, the unknown cost of the surveillance state is set to continue to inrcease. And in spite of a history of contractors doing shady shit and secret agreements, the City seems content with shelling out money from Entergy fines & ARPA to buy crime cameras instead of, yanno, helping house and feed people.
Councilmembers Eugene Green, Freddie King, and Oliver Thomas co-sponsored Ordinance 33,639 at the request of Mayor LaToya Cantrell. This ordinance has received a volume of comments of opposition from the public, and has been deferred multiple times by general council (the Criminal Justice committee is set to discuss the ordinance Tuesday, April 11). Many of the provisions outlined for expanding allowed surveillance techniques (like fake cell phone towers that collect data and facial recognition) are also listed in an NOPD draft policy, which would seem to indicate that this ordinance is truly at the behest of NOPD. In the past, Superintendent Shaun Ferguson has been critical of attempts at reform or bans on policing practices like tear-gassing pedestrians on an overpass. With a new set of incoming members to City Council, this appears to be the first major attempt from the City (and NOPD) to establish power in the city’s legislative branch.
It’s not terribly difficult to see the connections of capital and power within City Hall. Both Eugene Green and Freddie King own real estate companies, and Oliver Thomas has a history of support from a variety of local Black capitalists. This cadre of councilmembers appear to be furthering the state’s push for even more power in oppressing Black and poor residents to satiate fear-mongering from white elites & business owners. Will it be successful?
On the other end is a different trio of legislators: Council President Helena Moreno, Council VP JP Morrell, and Councilmember Joe Giarrusso. Moreno and Morrell have been critical of facial recognition, and Giarrusso voted in favor of the ban in 2020. And while these three members of council have had campaign funding from real estate developers & other capital interests, they appear to be moving in lockstep against measures to expand the state surveillance apparatus. The remaining member, Councilmember Leslie Harris, has navigated between these two voting blocs. She has already stated support for more surveillance cameras in District B, but appears to be on the fence with regards to Ord. 33,639 and has co-sponsored a resolution with Moreno, Morrell, and Giarrusso regarding public safety.
Eye On Surveillance has outlined in great detail the technologies covered by this new ordinance and why they are ineffective in stopping crime. Further analysis should be done to correlate requests to use surveillance footage with violent and non-violent offenses. To date, the most public case involving surveillance from the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) is when it was used to bust someone on parole for drug possession. And while people are getting killed during car jackings, the City is using RTCC footage in labor disputes with firefighters. There are dozens of cases where RTCC footage was not used to solve car jackings or armed robberies, but to further policing on formerly-incarcerated Black men, mostly on possessions of a firearm.
What’s particularly concerning is how state surveillance contrasts to the Smart Cities initiative that Mayor Cantrell and other members of council have been advocating for. Moreno has been critical of how the program will be funded by selling personal data from users of a city-wide internet service. We must make this clear — the distinction between state surveillance and surveillance capitalism isn’t a question of which is more exploitative, only the variety of ways they exploit us.
We should be concerned that the police are pushing back against modest reforms to give armed agents of violence more tools to put more people in cages. We should be disappointed in the paternalism that the Mayor and NOPD continue to favor over any community engagement about how they can feel safer. The capitalists want to make sure their properties are protected, that the tourists feel safe with red-and-blue blinking lights overhead, and that there is a continued stream of extracting wealth and labor from our communities into the prison system.
