Cops and Watchers
Mayor John Tory has endorsed security technology that will make policing worse and should be illegal.
This past summer, Mayor John Tory and his allies voted in favour of spending $4.3 million for the purchase of digital security cameras and microphones. The cameras and microphones will be placed in neighbourhoods like the one where I grew up in north Scarborough. The decision ensures that racialized communities will continue to be over-policed. This was an embarrassing, unethical, disgraceful decision by the previous Toronto City Council, and it is unlikely to be overturned by the new Toronto City Council that was recently elected in November.
The maker of the technology, ShotSpotter, is a security management software firm with a shaky record of security management. The company has lobbied City Hall politicians for years. The decision was opposed by civil rights groups and anti-poverty activists. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has worked with software that the technology itself doesn’t work well — it’s mostly the sales and marketing departments that are making ShotSpotter a viable business. This security technology “solution” appears to solve a political problem, not an infrastructure one.
It’s more accurate to think of ShotSpotter as a tool used to entrench existing power structures. The decision to use spying technologies fits into a larger narrative where neoliberal governments and private corporations are increasingly turning to hardware and software solutions to manage national and local security interests. Today’s political leaders weaponize collected data, cancel data pilot projects and misrepresent data points to score political talking points. Black Toronto activists were monitored relentlessly over the last 18 months. Sidewalk Labs has already begun pointing to cameras bought by public institutions to back its rhetoric that data collection cannot be stopped.
There is a mountain of evidence that digital cameras and microphones do nothing to prevent gun violence. Instead, targeted residents get rightfully more upset that they are being watched. Some of that anger spills into more violence. Over-policing actually deteriorates mental health, which in turn exacerbates gun violence [1]. We don’t need to look far for examples of how deteriorating mental health leads to worsening gun violence. The Danforth shooter had a history of severe mental health challenges for which his family tried valiantly to support him. The lack of health, employment and social structures are not the failure of a single family; they reflect on a failure of society to protect the health and well-being of its residents.
ShotSpotter is the latest chapter in a long, deep history of purchasing surveillance technology that listens for our most vulnerable neighbours instead of listening to them. Proponents of security data collection overlook the fact that Ontario already has the information it needs to take action on youth violence. It starts with dozens of policy proposals, including the Roots of Violence report, written by people with experience on dealing with tragedy and how to stop these tragedies from occurring: improve funding to legal, housing, transit, education, health, mental well-being support systems. It ends with a definitive end to biased carding, a demilitarized police force and any number of solutions to permanently end to police brutality.
Somewhere in between, we’ll need a complete, modern overhaul of our privacy and electronic communication laws to ensure that no Canadian is spied on, monitored or surveilled by law enforcement. It will take organized, motivated residents, including technologists who are paying attention, to stop these damaging systems from being used on our neighbours at the expense of our collective psyche. We know how to solve over-policing problems, even if fiscal conservatives don’t like the answers. We just need the collective courage to start speaking up.
[1] edit (05/12/19): I had it pointed out to me that the evidence overall shows people with mental illness are more likely to become the victim of a violent crime than they are to perpetrate one. There is a negative and hurtful stigma associated with mental illness, and the link I implied between those two phenomena is something for which I apologize. I’m here to learn, improve and try again, and I appreciate this feedback very much.
