In Bluffton, public surveillance technology has a use. But who’s behind the camera? | Opinion
On a recent 5:30 a.m. walk, I noticed that one of my neighbors had left their expensive-looking, newish-seeming mountain bike outside overnight.
The bike didn’t appear to be tethered to anything, nor could I see any locks on it.
It was just leaning against the wall, right outside the door, there for the taking should a taker walk by.
Lucky for my neighbor, I am not a taker.
But there are takers out there. Plenty of them.
What’s stopping someone from stealing that bike? I wondered. Are we now fully in that oft-written about dys-utopian future where we’re so widely surveilled that protecting our property from open thievery is no longer a necessity?
Not quite. But we are certainly becoming more and more surveilled — even, as it turns out, by the Town of Bluffton’s government.
Emails obtained by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette through a Freedom of Information Act request show that in March 2018 the town had nearly 60 cameras recording citizen activity throughout Old Town Bluffton; that Bluffton Police Department officers were repeatedly encouraged to routinely use those cameras, as well as the town’s Automated License Plate Readers; and that officers have access to this footage through apps on their phones.
“We are very fortunate to be provided with many tools here that other departments would love to have,” Bluffton Police Sgt. James Carmany wrote to staff in August 2017. “Please make sure we are using what has been provided to us including the ALPR’s and the Town Cameras.”
The existence of these cameras is not all that shocking, given the rapid rise and easy accessibility of watcher technology.
From any distance outside my home, I can tap on an app and catch my Boston terrier standing on my dining room table. I can even — should I so desire the reminder that I am not the alpha in this relationship — yell “Naughty” at him over a speaker and sit by uselessly as he ignores me.
So, surely, law enforcement agencies are going to have better tricks of the trade than that to solve the more serious crimes against humanity.
Nonetheless, it is disconcerting — especially when you consider that Bluffton is the same government that wasn’t even recording its public meetings until a year ago.
Especially when you consider that reports over the past three years have pointed to a lack of maturity and worrisome judgment within the Bluffton Police Department.
Especially when you consider the longtime whispers that some of the town’s elected officials have been occasionally inserting themselves in police business and blurring the lines for years between what is and isn’t within their purview.
According to a series by The New York Times about location services on phones, the public is somewhat apathetic to the idea that Big Data knows where they are at all times and where they’ve been for years. It’s an accepted trade-off to the conveniences and utility of our phones.
That’s on the global scale. It’s easy to regard our daily lives as microscopic and hardly significant at that level. It’s easy to regard the watchers as nameless, faceless and generally harmless.
On the local map, however, the camera angle becomes much tighter. We can make eye contact with the watchers, and information about where we are, where we’ve been and what we’re doing — even at its most quotidian and least salacious — becomes much more relevant and potentially dangerous.
Particularly when cameras and databases are involved, and particularly because there’s little regulation of their use.
And this should leave you with several good questions for Bluffton’s government — namely how has it been using this technology, how long has it been using this technology, how long are the recordings and data being stored, who has access to this information and under what circumstances?
Also important, has this technology been effective?
Are we safer because of it?
Under strong, ethical leadership and adherence to sound policies and procedures, cameras and Automated License Plate Readers can be effective law enforcement tools, according to those who use them.
At their best, license plate readers are force-multipliers and can quickly send officers in the directions of stolen vehicles and even help in the search for missing children.
At their worst — perhaps when small-town officers are bored and overly monitoring these readers for something to do — they can create more problems than they solve.
Two days after the Bluffton Police sergeant sent an email in 2017 urging staff to log into their surveillance apps every shift, a hit came over the license plate reader for a car that had expired tags, according to recent reporting by Packet and Gazette writers Lucas Smolcic Larson and Lana Ferguson.
The afternoon traffic stop resulted in an immediately suspicious and irate driver who felt targeted by police for his race and appearance (he did not know then that it was a robot that had flagged his car); an officer, now on heightened alert because of the driver’s reaction and feeling compelled to get the surly driver in handcuffs as soon as possible for safety reasons; a hasty tactical maneuver that left the driver with a split chin and in an alarming pool of his own blood; and a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the driver against three police officers and the department for excessive use of force.
It is illegal to drive a car with expired tags.
It is perfectly legal for police officers to initiate a traffic stop because of expired tags.
Traffic stops for expired tags sometimes lead to the discovery of drunk drivers, drug dealers, wanted subjects or other menaces to society and sticky situations.
But, unless I’m missing something, “expired tags” isn’t one of those crimes that has citizens calling for crackdowns or politicians promising great action to eradicate. Police officers are not gathering in squad rooms before their shifts to go over their “expired tags” missions and get pep talks.
“Go out there and find those people whose lives are already so chaotic they can’t pay their tag fees on time!”
We should all hope that just because governments can identify minor infractions en masse and in real-time, that governments are using the information only necessarily, strategically and in the wisest of ways.
We should all hope for the same when it comes to government’s use of the cameras.
Again, at their best, cameras are great tools to have. Who stole the bike? Well, let’s look and see, shall we?
However and unfortunately, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which an unscrupulous officer or government official with access to these recordings, decides — as a party trick, perhaps — to share with friends a clip of so-and-so doing something embarrassing on Calhoun Street.
It’s also not difficult to imagine a database of recordings getting hacked or compromised; or a divorce lawyer seeking some very helpful information that might exist about the whereabouts of a client’s former spouse; or a slew of Freedom of Information Acts requests from citizens for footage and data on friends and enemies.
For most of us, the only privacy we have left is at home.
And for those of us who call Bluffton home, it’s beyond time to ask elected leaders to be more vocal, open and forthcoming about the ways they’ve been watching us.
This story was originally published March 1, 2020 at 9:32 AM with the headline "In Bluffton, public surveillance technology has a use. But who’s behind the camera? | Opinion."
