For Mother’s Day of 2023, my friend decided to fly home and surprise her family. She planned to sneak away from campus, catch a flight, and arrive home just in time for the holiday dinner. However, my friend ran into one problem: like many young people, she continually shared her phone’s location with her family and was finding it impossible to maintain the surprise by suspending the sharing. She tried the straightforward solution of turning off “Share My Location,” but the sharing with some of her family members somehow failed to disable. She then tried deactivating all location services, which then prevented her from using the GPS she needed to get to the airport for her flight.
While my friend ultimately managed to hide her true location, her struggle highlights a challenge of our digital age: it is much easier to give access to our data than to take it away. But what if you didn’t have easy access to the location of your phone? What if you lose it? What if someone needs to find you? Why would you want to lose that location-tracking facility?
A similar “what-if” approach has been used in smart policing initiatives to make a case for, and soothe concerns around, the usage of mass surveillance for promoting public safety. What if someone steals your car – wouldn’t you want a way to know where it is? What if someone is shot and no one calls 911 – wouldn’t you want a way for first responders to quickly get to the scene?
Public safety is the aim of two surveillance technologies widespread around Chicago: Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) and ShotSpotter. ALPRs are cameras used by law enforcement to read plates and automatically match them to a list of stolen cars. The city uses 433 of these readers, which can capture thousands of images in a day. ShotSpotter is an auditory gunshot detection system that triangulates the position of a gunshot and alerts police networks. ShotSpotter, now suspended, was located in 35 of the 50 wards of the city. These technologies are partly successful at addressing the “what-if” questions: ALPRs help officers read plates at a scale that could have never been achieved before, and patrol cars with ALPRs are 140% more likely to detect a stolen vehicle. ShotSpotter has improved the number of gunshot incidents reported to law enforcement, increasing from less than 20% before the program’s implementation to over 80%.
Opponents of these policing innovations are not convinced that such seeming successes warrant the large networks of surveillance these technologies create. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois warns that “communities are deploying these systems without appropriate privacy policies or practices for protecting personal information.” Opponents argue that law enforcement prioritizes collecting as much data as possible, rather than establishing systems that encourage transparency, protect data security, and allow citizens to limit access to their data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation goes so far as to call the lack of protection and control over citizen data a “public safety threat”.
The way to reconcile surveillance networks harms with their potential benefits is to bring the benefits back to individuals. The reason why my friend, myself, and many people accept their phone storing data about their location is because it makes them feel safer – they have an answer to those “what ifs.” While ShotSpotter and ALPRs may support public safety at an abstract, programmatic level, residents may not feel the impact of the technology at the individual level. This gulf is particularly salient for the residents who are the most impacted by the crime the technologies aim to address.
These surveillance technologies provoke a law enforcement reaction to crime alerts but do not seem to help much in preventing crime. Carjackings in Chicago decreased after the network of ALPRs was expanded in 2016 until 2020, but have since risen to rates higher to what they were in 2016. While gun violence has decreased to pre-pandemic levels, rates of victimization and shootings remain at historic highs. In order to accelerate crime reduction, and effectively stop people from worrying about the “what-ifs,” CPD should use these technologies to take a preventative approach to crime; currently, the modern equipment seems to have little value in deterring crime.
The “what if” question surveillance technologies are aiming to answer may be incomplete. Take ShotSpotter, for instance: what if we could respond quickly to incidents, but further, what if from those ShotSpotter alerts, CPD could determine which communities to invest in to reduce gun violence and victimization? Similarly, what if the movement of stolen cars can be used to reinforce existing strategies that target the stolen car market, while guiding interventions that dissuade future carjackers? Adjusting how the data generated by surveillance technologies is used can help CPD better achieve its stated “proactive policing” goals, maintaining the technologies’ existing benefits while helping citizens feel safer. As always, it is not just the technology, but how it is employed, that matters.