American cities are relying increasingly on private security guards and advanced technology such as video surveillance to secure public space. New York City is gearing up for the first phase of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, a $90 million program that will install 3,000 cameras in lower Manhattan by the end of 2008 and partner police with corporate security forces. In Chicago there’s Operation Disruption–a multimillion-dollar effort that has placed 170 cameras in high-crime areas since 2003.
But a lot of it started with the broken windows idea [put forth by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly] that when routine little violations and rule breaking–lawbreaking–is allowed to continue, it leads to even greater crimes. So letting broken windows go, or jaywalking, or other seemingly innocuous crimes, when those are allowed to continue, the idea–which we don’t support–is that greater crime is going to follow, that when order breaks down in a community, it leads to greater violations, both in level and type. And so I think one of the reasons that surveillance or increasing the number of security guards has been favored by those that believe in order-maintenance policing is that you need to have more patrol officers on the street, more surveillance of these public spaces, to nip it in the bud to restore order as quickly as possible before it spirals out of control. And so I think a lot of the kind of surveillance technology we’re seeing as well as the privatization of policing functions is being justified in those terms.
Nik Theodore: On the CTA, for instance, do they have the power to detain or are they only there to call the police? They have all the trappings of an authority figure. They have a uniform. They’ve got bars. They’ve got the paraphernalia of policing. But will they actually leave the CTA box and chase down an offender? As far as you know, they do.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ryan Hollon: One of the ways that the security services industry works and claims more market share is to try and inspire confidence in the public. So the industry communicates to the public that it can handle securing transit, it can handle securing prisons, it can handle securing whatever the formerly public-sector-run field may be. And so as that happens, the contract shifts and the liability shifts, but there’s never a communication back to the people who pay the tax dollars about how this changes their rights.
If it’s done by private security guards, is it actually a legal violation or do they have that leeway?
Nik Theodore: It’s a couple hundred of the blue lights and all these other surveillance cameras that are now being put in place. There’s almost a web of surveillance around certain spaces.
Ryan Hollon: One of the things about the blue lights, that’s where we see our approach to security reshaping the character of a place. In gentrifying areas, you can see a lot more community discussion around the cameras sometimes, where some people are like “We like this because it makes us feel safer” and other people are like “We don’t want that because it’s a marker of crime in our neighborhood and we’re concerned about property values.”
