Not in my town and not in my name.
That’s my response to the surveillance cameras that the police have proposed to install permanently at the downtown intersections in Northampton. Here’s why:
The cameras will not stop or prevent any crime as Police Chief Jody Kasper has made clear. As a law enforcement mechanism, they have extremely limited, if any, utility. A lawbreaker who doesn’t want his image captured simply will avoid the intersections with the cameras.
On the other hand, the surveillance cameras would capture the image of every person in the major crosswalks of Northampton every minute of every day, which would then be stored for at least three weeks, and would be readily available to federal law enforcement upon request. ICE, the FBI, and Department of Homeland Security will all be able to apply their face recognition, biometric and lip reading technologies to those images. (So could the Northampton Police although the chief says they won’t).
Fortunately, there is a surveillance limitation ordinance now pending before the City Council. That proposal would not ban all police use of cameras. Quite to the contrary, cameras would continue to be used in the parking garage and outside the police station, as well as in police vehicles and for large temporary events.
If enacted, the ordinance could be amended by the council at any time to respond to local needs. Even now as the proposal proceeds through the council’s legislative process, its sponsors plan to amend it to specifically permit cameras for criminal investigations.
But the proposal would have one extremely important effect. It would stop the proliferation of this wholesale governmental intrusion into our private lives. While the City Council recently adopted a resolution against further deployment of downtown police cameras, a resolution, by definition, is nonbinding and aspirational only and has no legal teeth. In contrast, an ordinance has the force of law.
Proponents of this surveillance technology proclaim that there is no constitutional right to privacy in a public place. And there’s some truth to that assertion – in the sense that when you’re out in public, you can’t claim to live in Harry Potter-land, wrapped in an invisibility cloak. But in the context of this proposal, the mantra of no privacy in a public space misses the point entirely.
This proposal in fact would implement an enormous, constant and perpetual invasion of our privacy. Crossing the street in Northampton does not constitute our consent to the government creating and maintaining images and files of us and our friends and associates that can be shared with and retained by all law enforcement, local and federal, across America, forever.
Two related points: First, the ubiquity of private cameras does not mitigate or excuse the threat to civil liberties caused by such governmental surveillance. Second, such a profoundly deleterious change in the relationship between the residents of Northampton and the city police would have to be caused by some dramatic and compelling reasons. None have been offered.
I don’t think it is too much to ask that Northampton not become the unabashed local leader in surveilling its citizens. As reported by the Gazette, the Easthampton and South Hadley police departments do not use surveillance cameras. In Belchertown, as in Northampton already, cameras are used in and around the police station. Belchertown has one additional camera on the town common.
In Amherst, there is one surveillance camera, other than those in the parking garage and the Senior Center, apparently trained on the location where drunk students do stupid drunk-student things.
Let’s talk costs.
First, surveillance costs money, a lot of money. The price tag for the first year is $83,000. Costs would increase over time. So what are we talking about over the next decade: $1 million, $2 million?
Of course, after making the down payment for infrastructure in the first year, inertia and precedent would create enormous financial and practical pressure to maintain the system.
My suggestion for next year’s $83,000 and the subsequent $1 million: If you want to promote community policing, make the city safer, and make people feel more secure downtown, why don’t you use that money to put another patrol officer on the sidewalk or on a bike?
But the waste of taxpayers’ dollars is only one of the costs. The surveillance technology would also hurt local businesses. Many visitors and residents alike will follow the maps that undoubtedly will be ubiquitously distributed, showing how to navigate downtown Northampton without being surveilled by law enforcement. Some businesses will be difficult to access, and they will lose customers.
And just imagine what our city will feel like with notices on each corner of the city’s main intersection of Main, King and Pleasant streets: “Welcome to Northampton. You are being surveilled by law enforcement. All images available to the FBI, DHS, and ICE for at least three weeks. Enjoy your day.” Some potential visitors will decline to visit or won’t visit as often or stay as long. The same is true for residents.
But the biggest cost of this proposal would not be financial. The biggest cost would be the loss to our civic life caused by the shredding of our social fabric and the norms of Northampton.
“Paradise City!” I love our aspirational moniker. But a paradise city does not condone public officials sounding like George Orwell — as a few have recently — when they euphemistically describe the downtown surveillance cameras as “safety cameras.”
For the past two months, public hearings, City Council debates and intense discussion in the local media have focused on this issue. Residents, elected officials, and public employees have spent hundreds, actually probably thousands, of hours in considering the City Council proposal.
Dismissing such civic engagement, some public officials now are claiming that notwithstanding all this time, effort, energy, focus and debate, the Northampton City Council should not even address the issue, but rather should kick the can down the legislative road for six months. They dismiss the importance of this community involvement and want the matter considered only as one aspect of the capital improvement part of the Police Department appropriation in the budget next spring. Seriously?
This position not only does a grave injustice to all who have devoted so much time and energy to figure out Northampton’s public policy. It is, at its core, a terrible idea. Surveilling your citizens is not simply a budget item. It’s a matter of policy and morality. The time to pass the surveillance nonproliferation ordinance is now. If and when the time should come for a different policy, the City Council can pass one.
A final note. Some people think they should not oppose the surveillance cameras because Jody Kasper floated this proposal, and they like Kasper and want to support her. But this reasoning is sophistry, and it’s wrong. Frankly I doubt Kasper, a thoughtful person, would endorse it.
I like Jody Kasper and hold her in high regard. She and I have a good, positive respectful relationship, and this proposal aside, I’m happy she’s the police chief. But as I told her at the first public meeting at the Northampton Senior Center about this proposal, “I think, this is the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
I stand by that comment – and make one more.
The chief’s response to me that evening was funny! She said, “Well probably actually not my worst idea ever.”
Game on! So I added — all this is happening before a crowd of perhaps 150 people at the Senior Center — “Well the worst one you’ve ever shared with me.” And she said, “Well, that’s probably true.”
As this good-natured exchange tends to show, we live in quite an extraordinary town. For me, not being under constant government surveillance when downtown is an important part of the beauty and fabric of Northampton.
I hope the City Council will expeditiously consider and pass its surveillance nonproliferation ordinance, which is critically important to preserving the city we love.
Bill Newman, a Northampton lawyer, writes a column published the first Saturday of the month. He is director of the Western Regional Office of the ACLU of Massachusetts. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.