by Jasmin Maurer, PEP Director
This past April, the St. Louis Police Department unveiled the first stage of its latest technological toy, the Real Time Intelligence Center (now being called the Real Time Crime Center) at its downtown headquarters.
The RTIC is a hub for 24/7 monitoring of the 140 cameras in place around the city of St. Louis, as well as license plate readers. It will be staffed by eight police officers who will be able to send information gathered to officers via in-car computers.
This type of surveillance system was created with no public input from the people who live in St. Louis. The funding for it comes primarily from a grant from Motorola and funds from the Police Foundation. It has also raised a lot of red flags from the ACLU and Drone Free St. Louis for potential privacy abuses by the police.
The RTIC first came up in a bond issue proposal last year drafted by Board of Alderman President Lewis Reed. In the proposal was $4 million for its creation, but the bill was stalled after citizen concerns removed this funding from the original language and made it a separate question to be voted on.
The RTIC came up again, this time called the Real Time Traffic Center, in Amendment 7, which would have raised sales taxes for transportation funds. The amendment was ultimately voted down and the bond issue has yet to come to a vote, but those who came out to speak against the RTIC made it very clear, the public should have a voice in this change of policing practices.
That opportunity never came, though. The St. Louis Police Dept. went to private funders to get their center operational. The public wasn’t even allowed inside to view it for its unveiling.
At the same time, questions remain unanswered as to how those in St. Louis will be protected from privacy invasion. Technology has moved well beyond the realms of law, and what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy needs to be reviewed. Many of the cameras linked into the center are also owned and operated by business districts, allowing business interests to be policed by public services.
None of this even touches on the fact that cameras and surveillance aren’t even proven effective in reducing crime, the sole reason for piling thousands and millions on this project. Studies have shown only a minimal reduction in property crime, which evaporated after a few months. Cameras made no impact on violent crime.
So shouldn’t we be having a conversation around what will really make us safe? Much like our foreign policy, our local policing tends to lean on the side of spending more money and getting tougher instead of truly investing in programs that will create the types of safe and healthy communities we want to live in.
The money used for the RTIC would go much farther if spent on St. Louis’s crumbling school system, re-opening closed health centers, investing in poverty-reducing measures. Instead the city would rather invest in a surveillance center that focuses on capturing criminals and keeping our jails full. Sounds like failed priorities to me.
