New Orleans And Detroit Are Models For The Urban Police State
By Derrick Broze
ActivistPost.com
MARCH 9, 2018
Detroit and New Orleans are quickly becoming examples of a city under total surveillance. How can you prevent your hometown from becoming a Surveillance State?
New reports on the increasing amount of surveillance conducted by police in New Orleans and Detroit are causing concern among local residents. The Intercept recently reported on the $40 million surveillance grid being erected in the city under the guise of a “public safety plan.” This plan includes a massive closed-circuit camera system, as well as automatic license plate readers and a city ordinance requiring owners of bars and liquor stores to install cameras outside their businesses. Despite a lack of evidence showing that the surveillance programs actually reduce crime, city officials are pushing forth with little oversight.
The Intercept reports:
It seems that the only oversight will come from the city’s Office of Homeland Security and from within the police department itself, which is currently under a federal consent decree for a myriad of violations including “a pattern of stops, searches, and arrests that violate the Fourth Amendment.
A spokesperson for the New Orleans Police Department insisted that the department had controls on access to its systems, and that all activity on the system is logged and monitored, leaving an audit trail in cases of abuse. But beyond that, the department has failed to answer basic questions about how the cameras will be used, what technology it will incorporate, how long the footage will be stored, and who will have access to the footage.
Further, The Intercept notes that New Orleans civilians were largely left out of the conversation and planning for the mass surveillance grid. Other than representatives from the tourism and service industries, New Orleans residents were provided with zero public hearings or opportunity to discuss the implications of the plan. With the recent addition of the Real Time Crime Monitoring Center, New Orleans joins cities like Los Angeles and Houston who have access to hundreds (if not thousands) of cameras that are constantly watching the public. The controversial city ordinance would feed all the footage from the cameras outside businesses that sell alcohol to the monitoring center. In early February, New Orleans City Council delayed the vote on the ordinance until late March.
Unfortunately, these new programs are only the latest form of surveillance facing the people of New Orleans. Activist Post recently reported,
New Orleans residents might have been swept up in a dragnet of data collection without their knowledge. The private global data collection and analysis corporation, Palantir Technologies, helped launch a secret software program in 2012 with New Orleans police to track connections between gang members. Palantir was founded by the CIA’s venture capital firm, making the current findings exponentially worse for those who value civil liberties. Moreover, Winston documents the lengths that the partnership went to cover up the program’s disclosure.
The Rest…HERE
