NORTHAMPTON — Two weeks after a proposal to upgrade the Northampton Police Department’s aging and unreliable dashboard cameras sailed through its first reading in the City Council without opposition, the same plan came under fire from the public on Thursday night and consumed more than 3½ hours of councilors’ time before it was sent to committee for further review.
The council took nearly 90 minutes of public comment from local activists and concerned citizens who showed up to the virtual meeting to oppose a five-year contract with Motorola Solutions for a new dashcam system, then discussed the proposal with the police chief and the head of IT services before referring the matter to the Feb. 8 virtual meeting of the Finance Committee, scheduled for 5 p.m.
“A yes vote about this technology is a turn away from BIPOC communities who live, work and spend time in this city,” said Jesse Hassinger, who ran for City Council last year in Ward 4. “It is an affirmation to uphold white supremacy.”
Many speakers criticized Motorola Solutions for conducting surveillance for Israel in the Palestinian territories and supplying equipment and data to the federal Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency, while others suggested that the Department of Community Care and other social service programs should receive the $133,000 in city money proposed for the dashcams instead.
Several people said they were worried about the new system’s facial recognition capabilities, but Sciarra said that “neither the cameras nor the software” will have facial recognition or license plate scanners because the city will not opt in to those features.
“Our current system has not been functioning well or consistently and attempts to fix it with the current company have been unsuccessful,” Sciarra said.
Antonio Pagan, head of the IT Services department, said the current dashcams were purchased from Provision in 2013, but the company does not have a service and technical support contract with the city and the cameras are notoriously unreliable. The new system would be used under license, so the city would not own the equipment, but it would own the data it collects.
Pagan said his department, which manages all of the city’s technology purchases, has only a quote from Motorola Solutions — $49,000 upfront and $21,000 for each remaining year — but no other terms can be negotiated until after the City Council approves the order. He hopes to have a contract in place on March 1.
In the days leading up to Thursday’s meeting, local activists criticized the fact that the contract order made no mention of the Police Department or dashcams, potentially causing members of the public to miss the significance of the planned vote. Sciarra acknowledged that the order was vague and pledged to make them clearer in the future.
In a three-page letter to the City Council, former Policing Review Commission co-chair Dan Cannity wrote that the issue is a concern to him and “a great many others in the community although they might not even be aware of it.”
“While the intention to use cameras to record police interactions can come from a good place,” Cannity wrote, “most of the research on recordings of police interactions show that they do not make major improvements in anyone’s safety or reduce the harms of policing.”
He wrote that the proposed system would allow police to record everyone walking down Main Street and the artificial intelligence technology would “keep and tag that data, and run checks against other information in its own or possibly other databases. This could be aggregated into profiles. Councilor LaBarge goes to get coffee every day at 11 a.m. Councilor Nash drives down to Stop and Shop every Thursday at noon.”
Cannity also criticized the Record-After-the-Fact feature that allows for retrieval of video that was captured while the system was turned off, asking, “What are the implications here?”
Defense attorney Dana Goldblatt told the council that recording police officers to prevent civil rights infractions “doesn’t work.”
“I, like every criminal defense attorney, have had that one or two cases where (video) blew the case wide open and showed that the police lied and attacked a homeless guy,” Goldblatt said. “Most of the time, it does not affect the outcome when you get those videos. Police testify that all of the bad stuff happened off-camera or out of view. Judges credit the police.”
She said that, “in some cases,” a judge will not even ask police to explain discrepancies between video and testimony.
Motorola Solutions is listed in a February 2020 report by the U.N. Human Rights Office as having “directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the settlements” in the Palestinian territories.
The company’s activity is described in the report as “the supply of surveillance and identification equipment for settlements, the wall and checkpoints directly linked with settlements.”
Attorney Rachel Weber said that “Motorola is literally on a U.N. watch list for its human rights abuses … and the thought of this city making an additional contract with them is unconscionable.”
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.