Cambridge Police shouldn’t get more surveillance technology

On Monday’s agenda is a request by the police for additional surveillance technology, including license plate readers, a phone cracker, and a surveillance drone. This is a terrible idea:

1. In general, the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) cannot be trusted to follow their own policies, as their handling of the 2023 police shooting shows. (I’ll be talking about suicide and violence, so if that’s a problem you should skip this article.)
2. Given changes on the Federal level, expanding surveillance in this way is extremely irresponsible.

Can we trust CPD?

Arif Sayed Faisal was killed by the Cambridge Police on January 4th, 2023. A caller reported Faisal was cutting himself with a knife; he wasn’t threatening anyone but himself. Cambridge Police showed up, chased him, cornered him, and when he got close to an officer they shot him.

The city commissioned a report from a policing research organization called PERF. While the report isn’t particularly negative, it does cover ways the police should have acted differently: turns out pointing a gun at someone suicidal isn’t a good idea, who knew. But for our purposes, the most interesting part involves an interview with the officer who killed Faisal (bold mine):

Off. McMahon was interviewed by a member of the Massachusetts State Police and the CPD two days after the incident… During the interview, as he explained why he had used fatal force against Mr. Faisal, Off. McMahon said he’d been trained in the “21-foot Rule” and invoked it three times.

…

PERF reviewed CPDs training material, spoke to its instructors, and observed its most recent training on October 19, 2023. We were not able to find any reference to the 21-foot rule in CPD’s training materials; CPD instructors confirmed that it does not and has not taught this to its officers. And since rejection of the 21-foot rule has been part of ICAT curriculum since its inception, Off. McMahon would have heard this in 2019 when he had his ICAT training.

In short, on January 6th, the officer justified killing someone based on a rule (“21-foot rule”) he had never been trained on, and was not in any way department policy.

This makes the police department seem pretty blameless: they had a policy, and the officer ignored it and followed a completely different rule. But this is also where things start go wrong, in a classically CPD kind of way.

Here’s how CPD officials described what happened; notice both of these are multiple weeks after the interview with the shooting officer McMahon:

• According to the Cambridge Day, on January 18th, 2023, Police Commissioner Elow stated that “we do not see any glaring policy violation.” (bold mine)
• On February 14th, 2023, CPD put out a press release saying (bold mine): “Based on all of the information that has been reviewed so far, the department has not identified any egregious misconduct or significant policy, training, equipment, or disciplinary violations.”

An officer killed someone based on a rule that was not CPD policy and that the officer was never trained on, and the department’s response is to support the officer. The message from the top is very clear: policies don’t matter, officers can literally kill someone based on whatever rules they decide they happen to like, and police leadership will back them up.

I should also add that while this is certainly the most impactful example, it’s not an isolated incident; I can think of three others off the top of my head. Whether the issue is trivial or critically important, CPD will never admit it or its officers did anything wrong.

A year later, in March 2024, the police’s self-congratulatory summary of the report describes the killing in the passive tense as an “officer-involved shooting”, with a quote from the Commissioner explaining that “even if we did everything right, we never want to lose a life.” Again, note the passive tense; she can’t even manage to say that the police were the ones who shot Faisal.

Because CPD is never wrong, whatever an officer decides to do, policy or no policy, will always have CPD’s support. As a result, CPD’s stated policies are always more of what you would call guidelines than actual rules. And that’s a problem when it comes to expanded surveillance: whatever promises it makes about the policies it will follow can’t actually be trusted. If officers decide to violate those rules the CPD will never admit it.

And given the national context and the proposed ways the surveillance will be used, that’s a very significant problem.

Can we trust the Feds?

It’s worth considering as a baseline speed and red light cameras, which are not currently legal in Massachusetts; the governor is pushing for the former, so that might change. Because they are used to record an immediate event, only data about the car running the red light or speeding needs to be kept. Everything else can just be deleted immediately. You still have to trust the implementation, but at least there is a possibility of privacy.

In contrast, the proposal here is to keep all data for 30 days: every single car driving by. License plates will then be matched against databases from the National Crime Information Center, Massachusetts Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, and the Cambridge Police Department, to find stolen vehicles, people suspected of crimes, and so on. The proposal for license plate readers states that “Data required for investigatory purposes, evidentiary purposes, by court order, or by law is retained as appropriate.”

Now, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is run by the FBI. The Trump administration has already started purging FBI agents who were involved in investigations of January 6 insurgents and of Trump. The approach of Trump’s nominee for FBI Director is that Federal law enforcement should be an organization whose primary loyalty is to the President rather than the law, he’s aligned himself with QAnon, and he wants to prosecute Trump’s enemies. So what happens if the FBI starts adding people to the NCIC database not because they committed any crime, but because they decided they are Trump’s enemies?

Beyond that, what happens if:

• CPD’s database is used to track down undocumented immigrants to be shipped to Guantanamo?
• Abortion becomes illegal nation-wide, and court orders and attempting to get an abortion is a crime?

If an officer decides that they disagree with the City’s stated policies about abortion or immigrants, and arrests someone and hands them to the Feds, they will be complying with the law—and CPD will back them up. If we don’t want this data to be misused, the obvious solution is to not gather it in the first place.

A bit more

Song of the day: Watching You Watching Us by Barcelona (the one from Arlington, VA; there are a few bands with this name.)