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Police cameras can help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive—if we let them.
Crime in San Francisco, Jarico Anderson announced last year, “is over with.” Anderson, who raps under the stage name Dreamllife Rizzy, would know—he’s a convicted felon. Lately, though, he says that cameras have been making criminal life inconvenient. “Soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, and they going to start dispatching” officers to that area, Anderson said on an episode of the popular hip-hop and culture podcast No Jumper. “And when they catch you, they’re going to catch you.”
The “motherfucker” in question is an automatic license-plate reader (ALPR)—a camera installed on a light pole or a building that photographs and identifies license plates as they pass below, then adds the image to a centralized database. San Francisco’s roughly 500 ALPRs are provided by Flock Safety, a police-technology firm that claims its ALPRs are deployed in the jurisdictions of more than 5,000 agencies nationwide, recording billions of plate images a month. Networked together, Flock cameras can enable police to track cars in real time, giving them eyes across a city. The cameras also create a record of where cars have been, providing a view of millions of drivers’ movements.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Atlantic
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Charles Fain Lehman is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute.