The menacing actions of Donald Trump’s presidential administration and near certainty of worse to come had city councillors nervous Monday about approving high-tech police equipment including license-plate readers, phone hackers and surveillance drones – and they approved only two of three on a 6-3 vote that sent the drones to a more extensive examination in committee.
Two of those votes in favor – from the mayor and vice mayor – were delivered with a signal that the City Council would move to take back permission for use of the tech under the city’s surveillance law if they felt it was being used for reasons other then crime fighting, or might be. City solicitor Megan Bayer never actually said they would be able to; she promised only to get back to the councillors with an opinion.
After more than an hour and a half of public comment in which some 40 people opposed the tech and councillors began to express hesitation as well, police commissioner Christine Elow acknowledged the problem.
“There’s urgency as far as our criminal investigations of serious crimes. I think it really could help us,” Elow said of the tech. “As far as the timing – it couldn’t have been worse, right?”
Cantabrigians are increasingly calling for technology to prevent and solve crimes in what remains a relatively peaceful city: 66 people have been killed since 1990, according to Cambridge police murder statistics and recent news reports. The latest fatality was Angel Nieves, who was shot Jan. 13 in North Cambridge.
Twenty-two of the cases over the past 35 years are unsolved or uncharged, with police knowing the identity of the likely murderer but unable to make an arrest that will stick in court.
Paid for with federal money
The equipment can help when there’s a lack of witness testimony, Elow said.“Our community and elected officials have been asking for increased public safety tools. The adoption of these tools … will enhance our ability to investigate crimes, locate missing persons and improve situational awareness during critical incidents while respecting the rights in laws of civil liberties.”
A “GrayKey” tool that gets data off of locked phones or other devices, for instance, would be used only with a search warrant, owner permission or in “an exigency,” Elow said. “We’re not just going, ‘Hey, let me see your phone.’”
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25512411-020425-surveillance-tech/?embed=1
Federal Urban Areas Security Initiative grants would pay for “some or all” of the equipment requested Monday – $62,168 per GrayKey phone hacker annually; $3,000 annually for each of the 15 to 20 license plate readers to be placed around the city; and anywhere from $1,000 to $15,000 for a drone. No additional staffing is needed, Elow said.
To several speakers, getting money from a federal program intended for counterterrorism seemed even worse than self-funding. The tech “represses dissent and creates an infrastructure for federal policing,” resident Sean Joyce Farley said.
Expanding definitions of crime
Trump’s White House has promised sweeping and aggressive deportation tactics that target even law-abiding immigrants who are in the United States with permission, including through empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and potentially the military. Trump has also talked about deploying Homeland Security to use force on peaceful protests, and since his return to office, many states have further threatened abortion access.
The risk of outsiders using footage from newly approved surveillance cameras – expected to be tested in Central Square this spring – was raised in August, but with Trump in office the risk seems greater, commenters said.
Cambridge police might use license-plate readers to catch crime suspects, but others might have broader definitions for that term. “There are laws pending in legislatures across the United States – four states, at least, maybe five soon – that define abortion as homicide, right? There are laws on the books right now that being an undocumented immigrant is a crime,” resident Itamar Turner-Trauring said. “We have an FBI that’s soon going to be run by someone who is a QAnon enthusiast and wants to use the FBI to hound Trump’s enemies.”
“Moment of high anxiety”
Councillors too acknowledged a feeling of creeping dread. Cathie Zusy recalled being with a bunch of fellow city officials at a conference in Florida and realizing there were drones overhead. “It was very spooky just seeing the lights above and realizing that we were being surveilled. I think it was so there would be footage if anything had gone wrong, but it didn’t make me feel safe,” she said.
When it comes to the use of drones over crowds in a city with undocumented residents – including at protests – “you can understand why that feels chilling to people,” Burhan Azeem said. “There is a moment of high anxiety,” Azeem said. “We are in exceptional circumstances.”
Councillor Patty Nolan agreed that “six months ago, I might be approaching this differently.” Azeem had a list of questions for police and city staff from the local ACLU and Nolan was concerned that the civil liberties organization hadn’t been consulted considering all the work it did in crafting Cambridge’s 2018 anti-surveillance law.
Jumbled conversation
Despite Azeem’s attempts to go through the three requested technologies one by one with the ACLU’s questions, and councillors’ explorations of what safeguards would be in place to prevent hostile federal agencies from seizing data, the conversation was confusing and rushed – part of a meeting that ran nearly five and a half hours. It began with councillor Paul Toner saying to those suggesting that Elow’s proposals be sent to the Public Safety Committee, that “they’re being brought forward now to the council because they were discussed at the Public Safety Committee a number of months ago.”
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler later confirmed with city staff that it was only “the concept of surveillance” that had been discussed then, and each of the three proposals were new.
Elow told councillors that nearby cities were ahead of Cambridge on rolling out some surveillance, adding that the phone hacker was already available for use, albeit with a monthslong delay, by making a request to the state. They got examples of how the various technologies might help with anything from identifying drive-by shooters’ cars to finding lost Alzheimer’s patients. Use of a drone to look at a barricade situation could tell police when guns weren’t needed, councillors heard.
Asking for trust
Councillors wanted assurances about the integrity of the digital evidence – in Zusy’s phrasing, that the use of the tech wouldn’t “backfire” – and were reminded of the firewalls inherent in the city’s Welcoming Community Ordinance, which was passed in 2020 to clarify Cambridge’s status as a sanctuary city for immigrants.
“At this time, under our welcoming community ordinance, we do not voluntarily do the work of federal immigration officials or provide information, [and our] law enforcement does not do the job of federal immigration officials,” Bayer said. City manager Yi-An Huang underlined that “there are strong legal protections between federal authority and local and state resources,” though Cambridge would help to track down a terrorist.
“We are actually asking in this very difficult time for trust in both the separation of powers we have between local government and what’s happening on the federal level,” Huang said, “and to have these tools that I think will actually have an impact on our community.”
The assertions, though, bookended Bayer’s qualifying remark: “I cannot tell you what’s coming out of Washington, what orders there will be, how they will all come down.”
In the end, councillor Ayesha Wilson proposed approving the license plate reader and phone hacker but talking more about drones. The six agreeing were Azeem, McGovern, Toner, Wilson, Zusy and Simmons. The votes against were Nolan, Sobrinho-Wheeler and Sumbul Siddiqui.
Relationship with police
The council has been reminded several times over the years of its lack of power over the police and has encountered sometimes evasive, rebellious or deceptive testimony given by past commissioners. But the council in general considers Cambridge’s police officers worthy of praise and trust.
“I think of them in the terms of compassionate enforcement. We say, ‘How are they going to use it?’” mayor E. Denise Simmons said, referring to the new technology. “Well, you know, we have seen our law enforcement tie themselves in knots to keep the peace by letting people exercise their ability to peacefully protest.”
“My concerns about some of this really isn’t even about the Cambridge Police Department but about the federal government,” vice mayor Marc McGovern said. “Even with guardrails in place, what is this going to leave us open to when the next ridiculous, insane executive order gets signed?”
Many of the public speakers – largely young university students involved in protests over Gaza last year – had different perceptions of how police handled rallies. They were also upset at the continued employment of the officer in 2023’s killing of an emotionally disturbed young man running around Cambridgeport with a knife.
“No one here wants the cops to have more toys,” resident Lea Kayali said. “These three requests are very alarming, because they indicate that the CPD is trying to track crack down on residents’ constitutionally protected right to dissent.”
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The police have more than enough money and gadgets already. WAY more.
I find it interesting that the fear of added surveillance is that the big, bag boogeyman (this one being Trump) might come in and use it for nefarious purposes. However, not a chance anyone in current or future elected office here would do such a thing though because we are all the good ones. It’s just the boogeyman who might use it for bad.
@Brocktoon that’s a fair point. This is a police department, after all, that in late 2023 secretly deployed Keltech covert surveillance cameras in streetlights near Central Square to monitor protests, and pushed through new surveillance cameras near all city squares in 2024. Neither of those, obviously, were to do with Trump. Both were unnecessary, and Cambridge PD admitted that the covert streetlight cameras hadn’t led to any arrests or convictions.
Cambridge PD’s Surveillance Technology Impact Report on automated license plate readers linked to above, fundamentally misstates the law.
It says, “Because the cameras view data in public areas without a reasonable expectation of privacy, no search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment will take place.”
This statement would have been more or less accurate up till 2011. But since then, the Supreme Court has recognized a privacy interest in the pattern of one’s movements in public (Carpenter v. US, 2014), and MA’s Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that too pervasive ALPR can constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes (Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 2020).
…
It’s not OK for Cambridge PD to give a long-outdated impression of what the law is to the City Council, and as a result gain approval for the tech they want, whether giving that impression was intentional or not.
Presumably, if the Council had been clearly told that ALPR has in fact been recognized by the courts as potentially posing Constitutional issues, they would have wanted the Public Safety Committee to review whether this particular proposed ALPR installation (of 15-20 fixed units on every major road entering or exiting the City) represented a “too permeating police surveillance”, in the terms used by both SCOTUS and SJC.
Regarding the license plate readers: At least some tow trucks are equipped with a license-plate reader that continuously scans. If it reads a number that’s been flagged for repossession, it automatically pings the lienholder system, which immediately returns a repo authorization to the tow-truck driver.
The relevant point is that out of tens of thousands of license-plate scans, very few are actionable. But those that are can significantly assist law enforcement both with realtime alerts and with data searches before the information is automatically deleted 30 days after the plate is recorded.
Also relevant, the readers take only snapshots of the plates; no video, no driver or vehicle image.
As far as 15-20 units being deployed, that’s not overly intrusive when you consider the number of streets and public spaces that we have. Doesn’t seem like a big privacy deal to me, but more informed people than I can determine where the threshold of the 4th Amendment lies.
If you have a cell phone, and on social media, you already put it out there. Your whole life. What u do, where u live, what you like and don’t like. Just don’t do anything bad. They will find you!