In addition to those currently in use on M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, the Metropolitan Police Department has introduced even more security cameras across the city that threaten the rights of District residents. The new Joint Operations Command Center brings together video feeds from the newly-installed and the existing cameras to form the largest network of video surveillance cameras in the United States.
The majority of the new cameras have been placed in high-traffic public areas, including Union Station, the National Mall and around the White House. The cameras placed at the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street by the Georgetown Business Improvement District this past December are also included in the video feed, as are existing cameras above major highways, in school hallways and in Metro stations.
The new center forces city residents to surrender a remarkable degree of privacy simply for using public space. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that citizens should be guaranteed a “reasonable expectation of privacy” while in public. For citizens to expect to be monitored by a camera network so vast it can track their movements and interactions across huge sections of the city is not just unreasonable. It is authoritarian.
Admittedly, the JOCC does not operate constantly. But there are no clear guidelines for when it should and should not be used. As it stands now, it seems that the JOCC is to be used when the city determines there to be a threat of terrorist activity or public disorder. Now its doors are closed; during the the recent Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the threat was judged to be sufficiently heavy to justify the JOCC’s operation. Apparently high-profile, large-scale events require that the JOCC be open, even when those events aren’t in D.C. Even if the JOCC is to be permitted to operate part-time, the city needs very clear guidelines as to when and how it can operate.
Even more troubling than the vague guidelines for whether the JOCC can be used are the vague guidelines for how it can be used. According to Johnny Barnes, Executive Director of the National Capital Area American Civil Liberties Union, there are no current guidelines for Metro’s use of camera networks. For that reason, there certainly isn’t a system of guidelines in place to deal with any possible abuse of the system?voyeurism, racial profiling, etc.
Barnes also noted that camera networks have generally failed to deter crime, citing Detroit’s recent abandonment of a comparable system after 15 years of “mixed results.”
The JOCC is a completely inappropriate way to deal with crime or more threats of terrorism in Washington, D.C. It haphazardly infringes on the rights of all area residents, and all it offers the District in return is the knowledge that someone, somewhere may be watching.
