Boston’s surveillance report is a ‘huge deal,’ says ACLU of Mass. expert

This week, the Boston City Council is holding a hearing on the city’s first annual surveillance report. It details what sort of technology the Boston Police Department and other agencies use, and how they use it. Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share their take on the report. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: So before we talk about the details of the report itself, give us a sense of how big a deal it is to have a report like this. This is the first one.

Kade Crockford: This is a huge deal. We are really thrilled to have reached this annual reporting stage of the implementation of this ordinance.

For many years, advocates and residents in Boston have had to file public records requests — which can, as you know, take considerable time and doesn’t always yield results — in order to learn about how police in Boston use invasive surveillance technologies in our neighborhoods. And now, for the first time ever, we have a law in place that mandates these disclosures on an annual basis. And those are the documents that the City Council is going to be reviewing this week. So, yes, it’s a really big deal.

Rath: Give us a sense of what is being tracked and what we found out just in this first report.

Crockford: Sure. So there are various technologies that the Boston Police Department is using and reported on. And some of those technologies are really fleshed out in quite a bit of detail in these reports — others, not so much.

Compiling these records likely took significant time and energy, and I just want to applaud the administration for their commitment to doing this right and getting it right the first time. Many of these reports contain really vital, never-before-seen information about the role that surveillance actually plays in policing in Boston. And again, you know, providing this window into BPD surveillance practices was a key goal of the ordinance that the ACLU and our partners and City Council leaders who worked on the ordinance — which included then-City Councilors Michelle Wu, Ricardo Arroyo and Kim Janey — fought so hard for over a period of multiple years.

So take, for example, the reporting about the use of surveillance cameras in Boston. People’s general perceptions of the role that surveillance plays — these are perceptions, frankly, that are formed in part by fictional portrayals of police on shows like “CSI” and, you know, “Special Victims Unit.” Those don’t always match reality. And one of the goals of the surveillance ordinance was to ensure that the police are required to provide on, an annual and ongoing basis, details about how these technologies are actually used in investigations. And that’s important because we need to be on the same page — factually — when we’re debating whether or not police ought to use certain technologies, and if they do, what rules should apply to them.

These reports provide, for the first time, public accounting of how often and why police officers in Boston are requesting surveillance camera footage from the 1,700 cameras in use by the Boston Police Department across the city. And we’re still analyzing those records, but I can say based on analysis we’ve already done, we were really surprised to find that the number-one reason camera footage has been requested by police is to investigate motor vehicle accidents. I think that’s really significant because that finding surprised us, and I think it would probably surprise a lot of people in the city.

Now we are still missing some key information from these documents. Take the surveillance cameras, for example. We still don’t have an up-to-date accounting of exactly where these 1,700 cameras are located throughout our communities. This is information that the BPD has not yet provided to the City Council. We have sent a follow-up communication to the mayor and the administration asking for those details, as well as some other details, to flesh out other sections of the report where we think the police didn’t provide adequate information.

But I think that example is a really important one, because it illustrates that sometimes people have a perception that’s not really based on anything — not based in reality, not based in facts — of how these technologies are used by police. And that perception might not be accurate at all.

Rath: Yeah, very interesting. One surveillance technology that’s generated a lot of discussion is the gunfire detection system known as ShotSpotter. We covered it a lot on GBH. Your organization, the ACLU of Massachusetts, has been critical of ShotSpotter, among other organizations that have been critical of it, saying it generates false positives. And then on the other side, we hear from SoundThinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, that says that actually the technology saves lives. Does the data give us a sense of how ShotSpotter is actually being used? And what’s the truth?

Crockford: We analyzed Boston police records from a two-year period that showed that in nearly 70% of cases when ShotSpotter alerted Boston police to deploy to a neighborhood, the responding officers did not find evidence of gunfire. And that number aligns with what other studies have found in other cities, including, most recently, the New York City comptroller, and a few years ago, a report by the inspector general in Chicago.

We continue to have very serious concerns that ShotSpotter may exacerbate the overpolicing of communities of color and could lead to pretty serious civil rights violations.

The city’s report on ShotSpotter provides some information, but not a comprehensive accounting. And that’s one area where I caution the public and reporters and members of the City Council who are reading these reports to be careful about how they’re interpreting what the police department has presented.

The police department certainly presented its best case for ShotSpotter use. They described scenarios in which ShotSpotter was instrumental in apprehending shooters, or helping police get to the scene to treat people. What they did not do is provide a comprehensive accounting of all of the times in which ShotSpotter alerts — how much money the city is spending sending police officers into communities when close to 70% of the time they’re not finding any evidence of gunfire? There was no accounting in the records of what those police officers are doing when they’re deployed and they don’t find evidence of gunfire.

In the report that we published, based on the records that we read from BPD, we did find at least one example of a police officer who was deployed as a result of a ShotSpotter alert and then ended up engaging with a resident and getting them in trouble for something that had absolutely nothing to do with shooting someone, had absolutely nothing to do with violence. [It was] related to tints on the windows of their cars, and an expired registration.

So we are concerned about the impact that the technology is having, because it’s exclusively used in communities of color in terms of overpolicing and driving police to interact with people, potentially in a tense situation when they otherwise would not have, in cases where there may not have been any shooting at all.

So the records do provide the police department’s best case for the use of ShotSpotter. What they don’t do is provide a really comprehensive accounting of the entirety of the role that ShotSpotter plays in policing in Boston.

But again, overall, you know, the records represent a very important shift in the way that we do business here. So thanks to the mayor’s leadership, when she was on the council, and the leadership of existing city councilors, including Public Safety Chair Henry Santana, who’s going to be leading this hearing this week. Transparency and accountability are now required by law, and we’re looking forward to continued collaboration, both with the administration and the council, to ensure that these surveillance technologies and the practices are aligned with basic civil rights and civil liberties protections. And, frankly, what the community wants to see in terms of policing their own neighborhoods.

Rath: Kade, it’s been great having you break this down for us. Thank you so much. Super helpful.

Crockford: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.