In recent years, video surveillance cameras or closed-circuit television (CCTV) have gained popularity as crime fighting tools. In 2021, New Orleans approved a $70 million investment in the technology.
Here, in Cape May County, Sea Isle City’s governing body just recently authorized the spending of nearly $200,000 on public surveillance cameras for its business district and Promenade. Mayor Leonard Desiderio called the augmenting of the city’s camera infrastructure “just another tool we’re using to best monitor large crowds.” Incidents of unruly crowds of young people last summer have built a degree of public support for the move. Avalon also plans to upgrade its town watch video surveillance.
The use of cameras in certain high-profile environments may be necessary. Yet, when we seek to monitor citizens in order to better combat disruptive behavior in public settings, we are inching down a very steep and slippery slope.
Good intentions aside, the technology provides substantial opportunity for misuse. When we are asked to sacrifice any of our rights, including the right to privacy, for the sake of some common good, the potential unintended consequences of such action must be considered carefully and critically.
Is Video Surveillance Effective?
The growth in the use of video surveillance technology is surprising when one considers how few rigorous studies have been done to measure its effectiveness. COPS, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, sponsored one such study by the Urban Institute.
The results of the study, conducted in three urban locations, were inconclusive. In some, there was a reduction in crimes against property. In others, the use of surveillance cameras had no significant influence in reducing crime. Where there was a benefit, and one must measure any benefit against its cost, it depended on how the technology was employed, how regularly the cameras were monitored and how the technology was integrated into other policing functions.
In Britain, where cameras are extensively deployed, studies have failed to show a meaningful impact on crime rates. More is required from our political leadership than general statements about the cameras’ use in deterring disruptive crowd behavior. How, in what context, with what protections and at what total cost?
Privacy is a Right Among a Free People
Video surveillance is a technology ripe for abuse. It can abet criminal activity as well as deter it. Abuses, whether for inappropriate personal reasons, to target select groups or purely to satisfy voyeuristic tendencies have been documented in numerous instances.
The linking of the technology to facial recognition capabilities presents its own dangers. While this new capability, which has grown in its sophistication, is often seen as crucial in “solving the case” on TV police dramas, states across the country are concerned with its misuse. As this is written, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office has an online portal soliciting public comment on how best to regulate the use of the technology by law enforcement.
As is often the case, enforceable regulations have lagged behind the rising use of surveillance technology, leaving the public’s right to privacy vulnerable.
When authorities, no matter how well intended, gain the ability to monitor citizens in the conduct of their daily routines, the end must be great indeed to justify the means. For every unruly group that might congregate in a public place, a much larger proportion of average citizens are caught in the technology’s eye. That is what we must take great care about.
Balance of Benefits and Risks of Abuse
What one nonprofit organization has called the dangers of “mission creep” should not be easily dismissed. Unproven benefits in crime prevention, despite the appeal of the tempting call of the sirens, should not make us so ready to endorse a technology that is susceptible to abuse. More so, perhaps, we should not be so quick to assume the abuse would not happen.
Each instance of expanded video surveillance is often justified in specific circumstances. It is presented in terms of its benefits in dealing with a social problem. Yet, each also moves us further along that slippery slope of danger to our liberties as a people. The normal tendency is to readily accept the benefits, even if unproven and lacking in specifics, and to dismiss the dangers as the overblown rhetoric of people building mountains out of molehills.
Surely, we say, the limited expansion of video surveillance technology does not move us appreciably down the road to a China-like surveillance blanket supporting the world’s largest internal spying network, and clearly that is true. Yet, every time we give up a portion of our liberties, and privacy is a part of them, we embrace something that is at odds with our values.
We should need much more evidence of use, context, need and safeguards before so quickly supporting increased video surveillance of our citizens. We will not rid ourselves of some use of video surveillance technology, nor should we. However, to uncritically endorse it in wider and wider circumstances is dangerous.
The burden of proof should lie in its use, not in our opposition to it. In our view, Sea Isle City has not met that burden of proof and should reverse its intended project and not install the proposed cameras. Avalon should also end its plans to increase video surveillance of citizens.
Public surveillance is antithetical to the values of a free people. Exceptions should be allowed only in circumstances where there is a demonstrable public safety imperative and limited in duration. We call on our state legislative team to draft appropriate laws to limit the surveillance of the general public.
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From the Bible: Live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.” 2 Corinthians 13:11
