Is our video and surveillance culture going
too far?
(CNN)Last week's headline-making
incident in McKinney, Texas, was merely the latest in a string of
confrontations between the police and minorities. But while there has been much
talk about what was shown in the video -- an officer throwing a female black
teenager to the ground and unholstering his gun following a pool party -- there
has been much less discussion about the fact that the video existed in the
first place.
For a start, the pool party video cannot be seen in
isolation, especially as news stories pegged to cell phone videos are increasingly
commonplace. But a series of very different, but still related, recent
headlines have started to shine a light of the broader issue of videos and
surveillance.
At the beginning of June, for example, Congress allowed
provisions in the Patriot Act that had given the NSA authority to collect
telephone metadata to expire. About a week before, news broke came the
announcement that Amtrak would begin installing cameras in its locomotives to
monitor engineers following a derailment in Philadelphia that killed eight
people and injured hundreds more.
This new piece to the Amtrak puzzle felt inevitable. After
all, following nearly every public accident or crime these days there seems to
be either a call for the introduction of cameras, or else relief that a bystander
had a camera present during an incident.
Yet while it can undoubtedly be beneficial in some
circumstances to have cameras present to deter certain bad behaviors, or as for
forensic evidence, it's time for a wider discussion about some of the costs of
the increasingly pervasive use of cameras for surveillance in our society -- by
both the authorities and citizens.
The reality is that cameras are not the panacea they're
often made out to be, not least because the camera can, as they say, lie --
lighting, distortions of distance, cropping, and myriad other factors affect
how accurately an image or video reflects reality.
The French auteur Jean-Luc Godard once said "Every cut
is a lie," which has become a truism for filmmakers, including, notably,
documentarians. In her famed treatise "On Photography," Susan Sontag
wrote: "the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it
discloses." More recently, in a brilliant series of investigative pieces a
few years ago in The New York Times, documentarian Errol Morris explored the
veracity of famous photographs.
So we need to at least challenge our impulse to believe that
image equals reality.
And even if the images captured are accurate, that doesn't
mean their value trumps all else. Take the repeated, recent example of calls
for all police officers to wear body cameras. There have been numerous
instances of what ostensibly appeared to be police misconduct caught on camera,
only for there to end up being no conviction of the officers.
Indeed, our reliance on body cameras as a cure for police
misconduct may be diverting attention and resources away from other solutions
that actually get at the root of systemic problems -- lack of education and
opportunity for certain communities, income inequality, etc.
Similarly, while installing cameras in train locomotives can
help with the forensics of a crash, paying to install cameras in the trains
diverts funding from measures that could actually prevent an accident, as Tim
Sparks suggested
recently in New Republic.
True, conspicuous cameras in stores, public places such as
arenas and libraries, and of course city streets -- London and New York
notoriously are pocked with them -- may deter crime, or at least help with
investigations after the fact.
But we mustn't ignore the fact that the pervasiveness of
surveillance cameras, in addition to regular citizens filming with their own cameras
-- so-called sousveillance
-- presents some serious privacy concerns.
Cameras not only record the intended subject, but often
capture others as well. Questions about where the footage will be stored, for
how long, how secure it is, and how it may ultimately be used are far from
settled in most circumstances.
An editorial
in Canada's Globe and Mail on police use of cameras noted that
the police force in Calgary plans to "combine them with facial recognition
software." And that "the move could turn every officer into a mobile,
closed-circuit camera, hooked up to a database tracking and recording people's
movements across the city."
It is not even clear what effect the cameras have on
behavior. Though some studies have suggested the introduction of body cameras
has led to a reduction in the use of force, it is too early to draw firm
conclusions.
And it is also worth considering that self-censorship of
seemingly "bad" behavior -- that the presence of cameras ostensibly
curbs -- isn't always positive. For example, people may be less likely to
congregate for perfectly lawful protests against the state out of fear that
they will be filmed, and that the film could be used against them in some way.
Conversely, when citizens are filming each other or the authorities that in no
way guarantees lawful behavior.
To be clear, cameras are an incredibly important tool in
providing evidence of crimes or in determining causes of accidents. But with
their pervasiveness today, both from top down surveillance by authorities and
bottom up sousveillance by the citizenry, we really need to start a
conversation about whether this is a path we want to keep walking.
Pro: Cameras are an incredibly important tool in providing evidence of
crimes or in determining causes of accidents. So it is inevitable to use more videos
and surveillance to protect us and society.
Con: We need
to stop using more surveillance cameras
except special places because the random recording of people without their
consent presents some serious privacy concerns.