opinion

Al Franco: La Quinta, watch closely what you’re doing as you mull a surveillance system

Please, stop looking at me.

I really hope that the above nagging thought isn’t part of my future as I shop and play in one of the Coachella Valley’s premier cities, La Quinta.

That community’s leaders are considering how a system of cameras installed at various points in the city might boost security. Not that they’ve asked, but I suggest they think long and hard before venturing down this path.

The argument for such closed-circuit TV surveillance systems is that they can promote safety through awareness that areas are monitored; provide valuable data and visual evidence of crimes that occur for use in prosecuting culprits or perhaps even clearing the wrongly accused; help police spot and deploy to trouble situations before they escalate; and can be integrated with other systems to help with things like traffic control.

I must admit that those things all sound pretty good.

Still, the jury is still out that these benefits really outweigh in disparate situations what should be a main concern for all of us, which is maintaining our privacy. This is a bedrock principle in our democracy. No one should be eager to see it whittled away, even in the name of some nebulous, moving target of a greater good.

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A look at studies done on the CCTV surveillance topic — “The effect of CCTV on public safety: Research roundup,” by Leighton Walter Kille and Martin Maximino for Journalist’sResource.org — reported that systems and practices employed across the world had a mixed bag of both successes and apparent shortcomings. Among the findings that caught my eye: A study that found installation of cameras in some locations in Malaga, Spain, was followed by a shift of crime to other areas. A different study of cameras in South Korea, however, found a significant drop in crime and no significant shift in where they occurred.

The authors note that while Chicago has one of the largest CCTV systems in America with access to tens of thousands of vantage points, a 2013 Chicago Tribune OpEd piece pointed out that only 0.05 percent of the more than 1 million crimes estimated to have occurred in the city over a four-year period were solved with the help of a surveillance camera. William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff and commerce secretary, argued in his own January 2016 Tribune OpEd that Chicago needed to further expand and update its CCTV system to help its overburdened police force protect the city. That debate rages on …

There’s plenty more in the Kille/Maximino review of research, so look it up and dig in. My takeaway: It seems like what works well in one place might not be effective elsewhere, or perhaps even counterproductive.

Philosophically, the idea that everything I do might be watched, recorded and cataloged is a bit disturbing. What does he have in those bags he’s putting in the trunk of his car? He’s driving away, but did he come out of that nearby bar after a few drinks or was he buying shoes at the store next door? Is he yelling at that guy up the street, looking for a fight? Or is he just hailing a friend he’s late in meeting?

Sound paranoid? Maybe a bit. But, after all, we still have the right to a private life. Do we really want the entirety of our existences potentially scrutinized at police headquarters? Or, perhaps worse, at the HQ of some vendor hired by the city to do this work?

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This raises all sorts of questions that should be considered: Who will control these cameras and the things they see and record? La Quinta contracts with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department for its police services, so that is already a step away from completely local city control — as is seen in Palm Springs, Cathedral City or Desert Hot Springs, which have their own police departments.

In a case like La Quinta and its potential $2.5 million system, who ultimately will be responsible for ensuring that any such system that’s adopted actually does what it should do, which is increase public safety while not infringing on privacy rights?

It's good to see city leaders are taking it slow for now and seeking public input in this process. A recent public forum allowed residents to weigh in on where cameras might do the most good while having the least impact on personal privacy.

Transparency — both during this vetting process and afterwards in how the data gathered in this system, if one is created, is used, stored and hopefully ultimately discarded — is key.

Email Desert Sun Opinion Editor Al Franco at al.franco@desertsun.com.