High-tech policing: Do cities need Big Brother to lower crime?

Before heading out on his morning patrol, Lt. Zsakhiem James makes sure he has all the essentials. Badge. Check. Phone. Check. Panasonic Toughbook laptop with license plate reader and constantly refreshed incident ticker. Check.

James, a towering officer with a tattoo of his K-9 Unit dog, Zero, on his left forearm, has spent 22 years policing the streets of Camden, N.J., one of America’s most dangerous cities. In that time, he says, he’s seen “a lot of stuff.” Right now he’s on the front lines of Camden’s latest effort to drive down crime. And that effort looks a lot like a cross between Uber and Skynet.

An incident report pops up on the screen of James’ laptop: A black male in a white shirt and dark jeans, who may have pistol-whipped someone in the area the day before, has a gun. Within seconds, the program, in coordination with the department’s mapping software, automatically assigns the two closest officers in the field. Meanwhile, civilian colleagues back at base scour video feeds to see if any of the city’s surveillance cameras have an angle on the scene. All-seeing, on-demand policing.

“We’re armed with so much information. It’s not a blind guessing game where we don’t know what’s going on.”

— Lt. Zsakhiem James, Camden County Police Department

Even as crime rates have generally dropped over the past decade, police departments across the U.S. have outfitted their cities with militarized hardware and technology: predictive surveillance systems, panopticon-like war rooms, drones and gadgets that can map the location of a gunshot in seconds. In the case of Camden, this kind of equipment — paired with a new community-based approach to policing — is getting results. Since 2012, murders have dipped 51 percent, the once-thriving open-air drug market has been cut by 65 percent and shootings are down by 47 percent. In May, President Obama launched his new Police Data Initiative at the Camden County Police Department, praising it for its progressive approach to technology, and reformed focus on community policing. Last month, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used Camden as a backdrop in a presidential campaign speech.

But, as the national focus on police brutality and racial profiling has made clear, relationships between the police and the policed are fraught in many urban areas. And in so enthusiastically embracing crime-fighting technology, Camden has become an example of a dystopian policing experiment that may have grown too big, too fast to understand its side effects. Summonses for minor, nonviolent offenses have skyrocketed, overwhelming Camden’s municipal court, according to data collected by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Meanwhile, more than 100 officers have left the force, resulting in a department less familiar with the terrain and more inclined to rely on data fed to them by a computer. All of which begs the question: What long-term consequences does tech-enhanced policing have in high-crime neighborhoods?

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Camden used to be more than a public policy case study. At the turn of the 20th century, it was a booming industrial hub and shipbuilding port, well situated across the Delaware River from downtown Philadelphia. It was best known for RCA Victor — then the world’s largest phonograph manufacturer — which had a hulking factory there, known for its stained-glass window of Nipper the dog listening intently to the company’s product.

But as the manufacturing industry declined, companies looked to escape Camden and its heavily unionized workforce.The phonograph factory eventually went defunct and was only recently redeveloped into a hopeful “luxury loft” building named The Victor. The shipyard closed.

Camden crumbled slowly, and then all at once. Criminal activity spiked and racial tensions rose. In 1969, a rumor spread that police assaulted a young black girl, and the city rioted. Two years later, the city erupted again, this time over the death of a Puerto Rican motorist who was beaten to death by the city police. Latino community leaders led a march on City Hall, calling for better housing, jobs and an end to discrimination. They were met with dogs and riot sticks. For three days, amid clouds of tear gas, the city burned and local businesses were looted. The public safety director at the time called the crowd an “animalistic group of rationless two-legged beasts.”

The riots left Camden with millions of dollars of damage. In the following decade, the city lost thousands of residents, many of whom were white. Meanwhile, the black and Hispanic populations rose. By 1980, the poverty rate for families was at 32 percent.

The Camden City Police Department was no exception in the collapse of this once-thriving American city. With the loss of jobs, tax revenues declined and the city struggled to pay for its police force. After a budget shakedown from Gov. Christie in 2011, Camden was forced to cut its police department nearly in half. The result, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a piece that chronicled the devastating effects of the decrease, was a horrifying “cops-versus-locals, house-to-house battle over a few square miles of ... an isolated black and Hispanic ghost town.”

Camden caught the mainstream media’s attention a year later when it set a record for 67 homicides in a year and was declared the most dangerous place in America. It is only 10 square miles, yet it surpassed the per capita murder rate of major cities like Los Angeles and New York.

In 2013, Christie and local New Jersey leaders stepped in, broke apart the police union and replaced the city’s police department with a county-run outfit that wasn’t required to rely on the measly tax revenue of the city or limited to hiring from within it. Today, the nearly 400-officer department has an approximate annual budget of $65 million and recruits from more affluent neighboring communities like Cherry Hill and Haddon Heights.

Around the time of the department overhaul, the Camden County police also began beefing up its tech artillery,establishinga $4.5 million war room that was dubbed the Real-Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Center (known around the station as “R Tock”). The dimly lit cave is lined with 10 glowing 42-inch TVs that tower above a workforce of 28 civilians whose sole purpose is to monitor crime in the city. The footage they watch comes from “Eye in the Sky” cameras — eerie, spherical glass lanterns attached to telephone polls that give officers 360-degree panoramic views of the devices’ stakeout locations. Each camera’s feed is streamed directly onto the computer screens of analysts who are trained to recognize suspicious behavior and report it to police on the streets.

Also included in the war room budget: license plate readers for every patrol car. The cameras are attached to the front of police vehicles and hooked up to a software program installed on officers’ laptops. Every time a car drives by, a camera picks up the license plate number and runs it against the department’s record of past offenders. At the same time, it uses GPS to register where and when the car was seen. If police are suspicious about a certain vehicle, they can go back to their database and trace the routes where it’s been sighted.

The final layer of the department’s complex technical infrastructureis 35 bullet-tracking microphones, named ShotSpotters. Discreetly nuzzled into buildings around the city, each can detect and record the sound of a gunshot and triangulate where the weapon went off within 10 feet. ShotSpotters even communicate with cameras nearby, so they can point their lenses in the direction of a perpetrator and gather evidence immediately after a gunshot, Skynet-style. Since the installation of ShotSpotter microphones, Camden’s average 911 response time has plummetedfrom one hour to 90 seconds.

Working together, these machines have transformed the city’s bustling open-air drug corners. Take Fourth and York, a place where it was once as easy to score heroin in the open as it was to buy a Big Mac at the downtown McDonald’s. The intersection is now calm, though if you look closely, you can see remnants of a not-so-distant past. One of the “Eye in the Sky” cameras towers over a corner-store bodega with a brick wall containing a deep bullet hole.

“We’re armed with so much information,” James says, looking up at the camera. “It’s not a blind guessing game where we don’t know what’s going on.”

The confidence that comes with having an all-knowing, all-seeing system has encouraged the city to invest in even more surveillance technology. In early June, it expanded the ShotSpotter program through a contract worth more than $600,000.In mid-July, it approved 90 new “Eye in the Sky” policing cameras, bringing the total number of cameras monitoring the town to 221. The force’s 325 new body cameras — which cost about $800 each — will be put into use at the beginning of September.

“Just because you happen to live in a high-crime neighborhood ... you shouldn’t be ticketed and arrested for offenses that just a few miles away would go unnoticed.”

— Udi Ofer, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

Since the new county police department was formed two years ago, Camden has seen serious crime drop significantly. The number of homicides was cut in half between 2012 and 2014, and violent crime fell by nearly 23 percent over the same period. Skeptics say this “success” is merely the result of gutting a police department’s funding, letting it languish and then significantly expanding the police force. “Of course it’s going to be safer when they have 400 officers on the street,” Robert Fox, president of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police, told NorthJersey.com. “It’s too early to judge if this police department ... has helped or done anything.”

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Despite all of the recent changes to the policing system, Camden remains the most dangerous city in the state. The overhaul also hasn’t improved the department’s relationship with struggling and frustrated residents. Kelly Francis, the head of the Camden NAACP and a resident of the city for 60 years, is bothered by the fact that so many officers come from outside the city and leave as soon as their shifts end.

“If you don’t share the same circumstances with the people that you work for, you’re not going to have the same concerns, “ he says. “That’s human nature.”

Francis cites the story of Ta’Quan Allen, a 19-year-old who graduated last year from Camden’s Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy. Allen taught himself to make videos by watching YouTube tutorials, and used a camera his mom bought him to make a short film called “Wake Me Up.” The movie won prizes in state and national competitions sponsored by the NAACP, and the success propelled Allen to a two-week internship at MTV in New York.

When Allen returned to Camden, he took to filming again. He gathered some friends behind a vacant house and brought along an empty .32-caliber revolver, which he says was passed down through his family for protection, to use as a prop. When three cops spotted the group, they arrested Allen and charged him with firearms possession; bail was set at $100,000. That sum was eventually lowered, but Allen’s mother still needed help from Francis for the bail bond. “If these cops knew him, they’d know that this is Ta’Quan Allen, and this is what he does,” says Francis. “They thought he was a drug dealer or a gangster or whatever. Because they don’t know.”

Arrests for nonviolent crimes — like Allen’s possession of an unloaded gun — have spiked in Camden over the past two years, overwhelming the county’s municipal court. In the Camden County Police Department’s first full year policing the city, summonses for riding a bicycle without a bell or a light rose from just three to 339, summonses for failure to maintain lights or reflectors on a vehicle rose 421 percent and summonses for illegally tinted car windows increased 381 percent, according to reporting by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Just because you happen to live in a high-crime neighborhood — which usually means that you’re a low-income person of color — you shouldn’t be ticketed and arrested for offenses that just a few miles away would go unnoticed,” says Udi Ofer, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. “It just entangles people within the criminal justice system and has a spiraling effect.”

“Arrests for nonviolent crimes have spiked in Camden over the past two years, overwhelming the county's municipal court.”

Camden Police Chief J. Scott Thomson says the department’s primary mission is to gain the community’s trust. “We continually impress upon our officers that during the course of an investigation for a minor infraction, the preferred outcome is a warning,” he told Yahoo News in an email. Under his watch, he’s asked officers to start walking (or biking) down the streets, knocking on residents’ doors and speaking with local business owners.His department is also working with the White House to develop software that better tracks and manages citations for minor infractions.

Thomson admits that sometimes his officers use lesser citations to improve the safety of a community. “When a mother tells me she is afraid to allow her children to play outside their house because menacing drug/gang members have taken to bicycles to counter our police officers who are walking the beat, we will use bicycle laws to protect the good people and their children,” he says.

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The larger issue looming over Camden’s police department is a familiar one in the era of National Security Agency eavesdropping and warrantless wiretapping. Privacy advocates worry that the city’s mass surveillance campaign is violating the fundamental rights of the city’s residents. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says surveillance equipment is disproportionately used to arrest people for nonviolent crimes. She cites the example of license plate tracking software used in Los Angeles that collects and stores information on millions of residents for the purpose of recovering stolen vehicles, but can also be saved and accessed for up to five years.

“As a society, we’re sacrificing our privacy and our ability to move about anonymously in a democratic society for the chance to catch petty criminals,” says Lynch.

Though Camden's police tech experiment is too new to show real evidence that the equipment it has invested in makes a difference, Oakland and Los Angeles, Calif. police departments serve as both models and a cautionary tales. In Oakland, local police use some of the same technology Camden is putting to use — and more. As the Oakland Police Department’s Assistant Police Chief Paul Figueroa points out, there are benefits to being located in Silicon Valley “and we intend to take full advantage of that.” He is working with Microsoft to rebuild its entire policing software system from scratch and with Stanford University to analyze video from its 700 body cams.

“As a society, we’re sacrificing our privacy and our ability to move about anonymously in a democratic society for the chance to catch petty criminals.”

— Jennifer Lynch, attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The number of murders in Oakland has dipped from 126 in 2012 to 80 in 2014. Shootings have decreased 26 percent since 2012. And since officers began wearing body cameras in 2010, use-of-force incidents have been reduced by 72 percent.

Yet, despite these improvements, the department is still plagued with issues of distrust, fueled by incidents like the 2009 shooting of unarmed 22-year-old Oscar Grant by a BART police officer in Oakland. A recent report by a court-appointed investigator described Oakland police’s process for dealing with problem officers as “broken.” The majority of the department’s stops between April 2013 and October 2014 were of African-Americans, despite the fact that they only make up 28 percent of Oakland’s population. Additionally, a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that the Oakland Police Department’s license plate scanners disproportionately captured data from the city’s poorest neighborhoods (and subsequently forced those residents into the East Bay’s costly traffic violation system).

Should low-income areas like Camden or Oakland abandon the luxury of privacy when struggling to deal with the highest murder rates in the country? Camden Assistant Chief of Police Orlando Cuevas argues that when there are bigger problems, cameras are actually welcome in neighborhoods. “One of the things I hear most is, ‘How do I get a camera in my neighborhood?’” he says. The department has also made efforts to share the technology with the community. Residents can apply for access to a website that provides a live view from any camera set up around the city, and they can use the information to write their own tips and pinpoint the locations of crimes. A national poll conducted by the Washington Post in November 2013 found that only 14 percent of the population felt there should be fewer cameras in public places.

Tim Gallagher, a social worker at a Camden youth development program, says the Camden police department’s efforts to build ties with community members have made a dramatic change in the neighborhoods. Two years ago, a man was stabbed right in front of his home on Fifth and State streets in the middle of the afternoon; now, he says, kids are playing in the streets, sometimes even with police officers.

“I’ve honestly not heard anyone saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re using cameras,’” he says. “The people that are bothered by that are usually the people who are not doing good things.”

Lynch says that before cities like Camden go all in on surveillance gadgets, they need to have serious discussions about limiting their reach and commission research to see if cameras actually help to prevent crime, not simply put it out of sight. Past studies in the UK, San Francisco, and L.A., for instance, actually reported cameras to be generally ineffective in preventing violent crimes. She also hopes to see more discussion over plans to review the need for the city’s immense collection surveillance technology once crime drops.

James, however, has a hard time imagining that scenario.

“It’s all about omnipresence,” he tells me as we drive through an area where several batches of a poisonous fentanyl-laced heroin have killed nearly a dozen people. “You want the bad guy to think, ‘If I turn my head, there’s gonna be a cop there.’”