Privacy or security? The United States has developed surveillance cameras from cities to suburbs

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Reuters Release time: May 11, 2023 5:50 p.m

Officer Mike Martinez has a map of all the surveillance cameras in the California town of Aalto.

As he drives around town, he can spot even the most covert surveillance devices, from small cameras at a corner gas station to a row of devices on the walls of warehouses a few blocks away.

"It's not about me spying on you," he said, sitting behind the wheel of his black-and-white police SUV. "It's about public safety."

Over the past year, Martinez has been trying to persuade owners of private surveillance cameras to join a city-run project that could share control of those cameras with police.

In 2019, the city of 100,000 people became one of the first cities on the West Coast to introduce Fusus technology, an American security technology company that aims to strengthen public safety by making it easier for police to access privately owned surveillance cameras.

In 2022, the company told surveillance research firm IPVM that it had helped network more than 33,000 individual cameras in more than 2,400 different locations in the United States.

In Rialto, police have access to more than 150 live probes in restaurants, gas stations and private residential areas, a number they hope to increase through outreach by Martinez and others.

According to public records requests and announcements, Fusus technology is being operated by police departments, school districts and sheriffs in more than 70 different cities and counties in more than a dozen states as part of public safety initiatives.

Since the beginning of the year, more than a dozen small and medium-sized cities and suburbs have introduced or expanded the use of Fusus tech, sparking local debates about the balance between privacy and public safety for city dwellers.

According to Fusus, police chiefs and city leaders, connecting public and private cameras to one surveillance system is key to modern policing, allowing officers to have greater "situational awareness" and making it easier for them to retrieve evidence.

To critics, such a system tramples on residents' privacy and risks giving police tools that are vulnerable to abuse.

"This surveillance happens in areas that are already overregulated, and it doesn't make us safer," said Nia Sadler, an advocacy group Triad Repeal Project, which ran an unsuccessful campaign last year against the use of Fusus tech in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Sadler said Winston-Salem's surveillance cameras tend to focus on areas where black residents like them live — a common criticism from local activists who oppose the use of Fusus tech.

Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the New York Surveillance Technology Monitoring Project, said Fusus is helping smaller U.S. communities mimic the surveillance model of big cities, "bringing surveillance cities to the suburbs."

This, he and other critics say, raises myriad privacy and civil rights concerns.

"Fusus takes surveillance tools that are inherently constitutional, and aggregates them into a kind of ongoing tracking (when used by government agencies) that is blatantly unconstitutional."

Over the past three weeks, Fusus has not responded to multiple requests for comment. In a report published on its website, the company said its technology offers "greater security while taking privacy into account," citing "strong community protections," including tracking activity logs of how police use the tool.

"Real-time crime monitoring center in the eyes of the clouds"

For more than a decade, larger U.S. cities have been building integrated surveillance programs that typically connect public and private cameras that enable police to monitor locations.

In 2012, New York City partnered with Microsoft to launch Domain Name Awareness System, and in 2016, Detroit partnered with Motorola to launch the Greenlight Project — both of which connect public and private camera networks.

But Sean Barton, a product manager at IPVM, says such a system is often out of reach for smaller communities.

"So Fusus has entered and grabbed significant market share," said Barton, who wrote a 2022 report on Fusus that received a $21 million investment from police body camera maker Axon.

Fusus CEO Chris Lindenau said in a March podcast interview with Business Radio that the company's goal is to build New York-style surveillance systems for thousands of smaller police departments across the United States.

Fusus' annual fees start at less than $20,000 and provide cities with a so-called "real-time crime monitoring center cloud," while New York's system costs as much as $40 million to build, according to local media reports.

Police then encourage business owners to buy hardware that integrates their live cameras with police networks, allowing police to call up private camera networks on their phones, tablets, and desktops.

The camera network also complements feeds from Axon's body cameras, as well as drones and public CCTV cameras.

Cameras can be registered on the system without additional hardware — including home cameras like Amazon Ring Devices — providing police with a list of devices that they can scrutinize to find evidence after a crime has occurred.

According to Pew Research, the overall crime rate in the United States has been steadily declining since the '90s, even as property crime and murder in the United States have risen since the coronavirus pandemic.

Industry research group IHS Markit found that the number of public and private surveillance cameras in use increased from 70 million in 2018 to 85 million in 2021.

Research on the relationship between surveillance cameras and crime is mixed – some studies suggest that the presence of cameras does reduce crime, while others suggest that it simply replaces criminal activity.

Rialto made a big bet on cameras: from 2020, all new or remodeled commercial and industrial properties in the city were required by the police to register cameras in the Fusus system and allow police access to a live view, according to the police.

Police in Rialto hope to be able to draw a circle on a map of the city and automatically call up security cameras from cameras within that radius, tracking anyone who passes through those areas.

Based on training materials and referral documents obtained through public records requests, cities can also integrate the Fusus platform with a suite of other big data policing tools.

These include automated license plate readers, gun detection tools Shotspotter and predictive policing, as well as artificial intelligence monitoring tools that allow police to scan specific cars or people in a city.

For example, a Fusus training document from the Atlanta police department shows that police can set up an AI-powered "alarm" that scans images of people in cities wearing certain colors or holding bags.

"[Fusus] is ambitious," said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who studies big data policy. "It combines all these big data technologies into one user-friendly system."

Fusus said in its white paper that "facial recognition or innate human characteristics" are not used or stored in its database.

In Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Fusus system is integrated with technology from Geolitica, a company that provides "predictive policing" tools that were formerly known as PredPol until 2021.

According to a departmental policy document, the Geolitica-Fusus partnership enables what the city calls "virtual patrols," in which police use predictive algorithms to focus on parts of the city that predict possible crime and plug in nearby cameras.

In The Markup, a 2021 investigative journalism website, which analyzed nearly 6 million crime predictions made by the PredPol algorithm, it found that "residents of targeted neighborhoods with increased patrols are more likely to be home to black and Latin Americans." ”

Nedia Morsy, head of Make the Road, a Elizabeth City immigrant rights group, said: "There is no public debate about this, people don't know they're being followed like that."

"It's hard to imagine that this doesn't add over-regulation to our Black and Brown communities."

Neither the Elizabeth Police Department nor Geolitica responded to specific questions about the project. Geolitica previously called the labeled data used in its study "incomplete."

Public safety

For his part, Jay Bhagat, the owner of a gas station in Rialto that has ties to the Fusus network, reassured him that police could listen in real time. "Before Fusus, our employees were afraid to work night shifts," he said.

Community engagement officers have been visiting local businesses to explain that joining Fusus will make it easier for police to spot and remove unwanted people from the premises.

"It saves us time," explained Baga, who set up the system earlier this year after a series of store thefts and can now easily share the footage with police.

For Martinez, "these places don't have privacy — they're public places."

Not all business owners think so. Sarah Johnson, owner of an aquarium store in Columbia, Missouri, launched a campaign against Fusus' launch in the city, expressing concern that police could misuse the camera network.

"People can easily target minorities and homeless people in our community," she said.

In late 2022, the Missouri City Council rejected the proposal to adopt Fusus tech amid strong opposition from the community.

City Council member Pat Fowler, who voted against adopting the plan, said she doesn't believe more surveillance will lead to greater public safety.

"We asked Fusus: What kind of crime are you trying to solve with this? Show us its working data. But they're not going to produce anything," Fowler said.

Fusus did not respond to questions about how it measures the effectiveness of its tools.

The company publishes case studies on its website highlighting examples of police arresting suspects with the help of Fusus-related cameras.

An April blog post praised Fusus tech for helping police improve clearance rates in many cities, including Atlanta, Georgia, Rocky Mountain in North Carolina and Bay County in Florida.

In a 2022 study posted on its website, Fusus cited a crime statistic in Jackson, Mississippi, saying the 51% drop in crime can be attributed to the introduction of the city's Fusus platform.

Jackson police did not respond to a request to clarify the relationship between Fusus tech and crime rates, but in 2020, police told NBC News that 51 percent of the crime reduction before the city launched the Fusus platform was related to new public cameras.

The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been overseeing the implementation of Fusus tech across the country and has shared public records of Fusus contracts in dozens of cities.

"You walk down the street, you walk out of your house, you go to the movies, or you go to your lawyer's office, and now there's cameras everywhere," said Adam Schwartz, a senior attorney at the EFF.

"These business-police partnerships are putting us all under the microscope as we live our lives: any community considering Fusus should think twice."

Open debate

In many cities that have adopted the Fusus platform, critics say there is little to no public debate. In 2021, the city of San Gabriel, California, voted to approve the technology at a meeting with no public comment.

Maggie Ullman, president of the Environment and Public Safety Committee in Asheville, North Carolina, said the city's decision earlier this year to adopt the Fusus system was due in part to severe staffing shortages at the local police department.

She said the webcam network would allow police to have more eyes at the scene, adding that before she voted to approve the launch, she was assured that the platform would not employ facial recognition technology.

"So many homes and businesses choose to install cameras," she said. "For the sake of our public safety, we need to be innovative and willing to take risks within reason."

Privacy advocates are concerned about a general lack of oversight.

Law professor Ferguson reviewed draft policies governing the use of Fusus systems in South Bend, Indiana, Columbia, Missouri, and the Virtual Patrol program in New Jersey.

"These policies do woefully underthinking harmful issues like race, the right to privacy and the First Amendment rights of citizens," he said.

He explained that they did not elaborate on what kind of punishment would be imposed on officials who abuse the system, nor what role the surveillance system would play in monitoring political activities such as public protests.

In some places, including Rialto, police have not developed any specific policies governing the use of Fusus tech.

When the city of San Gabriel adopted the system in 2021, Police Chief Gene Harris told the City Council that one of the reasons he recommended the product was that he had seen the system "field test" in Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter protest the previous year.

Harris, now the police chief of Pasadena, Calif., said in an emailed commentary, "If they are public events, then there is a right to monitor, photograph and record." ”。

The Minneapolis Police Department did not respond to a series of questions about the Fusus program.

EFF's Schwartz said he was concerned about law enforcement's use of Fusus tech to monitor demonstrations and public protests.

"If you put this surveillance technology in the hands of the police, they'll use it for protests, for political activism, like the Black Lives Matter movement," he said. "That's what history shows us – it has a huge chilling effect on democratic activism."

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