In Turkey, Black Boxes Aim to Turn Neighbors into Spies

Istanbul has been abuzz this week with the harsh verdicts meted out in the five-year Ergenekon coup plot trial, with 17 of 275 defendants receiving life sentences for plotting to overthrow the government. It’s a stern warning to coup plotters, to be sure, much like another bit of recent, less-covered news.

Last week, police announced plans to install neighborhood informant boxes in cities across Turkey. Dubbed the Confidential Police Notice Point Project, the move will allow residents to submit anonymous written and oral tips on their neighbors. Picture a small black box on the corner where neighbors drop in slips of paper incriminating one another for offenses like banging pots and pans in support of the Gezi Park protesters (a nightly show of solidarity in many urban areas in the weeks following the countrywide protests).

“It’s a crime to disturb neighbors,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly said in July, urging the public to turn in dissenters. “I’m telling you that such acts require punishment.”

The informant boxes follow a government decision to replace private security workers with state police at all state-run universities, the better to keep an eye on protest-prone college students. Meanwhile, anti-government protests that started back in May continued this past weekend.

On a sultry night, police chased a few hundred demonstrators from Gezi Park using teargas. Then, seemingly unaware of the irony, they drove armored trucks down Istiklal, or Independence, Avenue — Istanbul’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, filled with high-end shops and cafes — shooting rubber bullets at those brave or dumb enough to get in their way.

All this should be acutely troubling to anyone who cares about democracy in the urban world. Istanbulites long weary of the gaze of their government now must look into the eyes of their neighbors. Sure, in the 21st century, public assistance for crime-solving is a must. And most Western countries maintain anonymous hotlines and 411 numbers citizens can call with information on crimes and suspicious activity. But tools similar to the informant boxes have been used in dictator-run Arab countries, and as well as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia — places where secret police kept watch and public trust evaporated.

In fact, local informants are not completely new to Turkey. “Historically, Istanbul police relied on local informants — the imam, the mukhtar (neighborhood or village leader) — at times of social unrest,” Fariba Zarinebaf, director of Middle East and Islamic studies at the University of California-Riverside and author of Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 1700-1800, said via email, citing the late 19th century. “But I doubt these measures were ever that effective.”

In a modern world, with a government that has used force to silence demonstrators and cast them as looters, terrorists and rodents, this plan seems far more sinister.

What’s more, the rule of law has never been terribly strong in Turkey. With anonymous reporting, the potential for abuse is considerable. The government has in recent months made little secret of going after journalists it deems a threat to its reputation. What would stop the authorities from going after citizens that draw their ire, claiming an informant’s tip as their prod?

“It is interesting that dissent, i.e. banging on pots and pans, is being defined as a crime,” Zarinebaf said. “Citizens are asked to report this specific form of dissent, and you can imagine how much tension this would create among neighbors who may be mad at each other for various reasons, trying to settle scores.”

On the conservative Istanbul street where I live, near Galata Tower in Beyoglu, locals are out in the street all day. Older men chat, smoke and stare while headscarved women watch their children play and young boys huddle in groups to snack and laugh. They know everybody and trust each other. Crime is rare.

Security in the city relies on a patchwork of similarly organic neighborhood watches, based on familiarity. Take away that sense of familiarity and openness, and erode the system of public trust that has made Istanbul one of Europe’s safest cities.

“If the boxes work, it will tear away the unity of the mahalle (neighborhood) and will create extreme distrust,” Zarinebaf said. “But I am sure the citizens will defy the measure in most neighborhoods. The public has a clear understanding of what constitutes a ‘crime’ and when they should inform on criminal elements.”

The question is whether they may begin to expand those concepts at the urging of their government. In a recent television ad from the government security directorate, a young man is shown giving a rose to a young girl. Soon after, the girl is seen chanting slogans in a street protest. “They use the mask of ‘standing up for your rights’ in small demonstrations,” the narrator says, “ then they quietly steal your child from you.” The story closes with the girl becoming a suicide bomber.

The message is that any young person who stands up for his or her rights is a terrorist — and that everyone must be on guard against threats lurking in plain sight, like the young man with the rose.

There is, however, still hope for many parts of Istanbul where residents have already banded together in the wake of the Gezi protests. Urban Turks have launched more than 100 neighborhood forums all over the country. Most groups meet a few times per week and discuss the issues of the day, from the local to the national, and tend to share a strong sense of solidarity in opposition to the government of Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

For these groups, the informant boxes will not be a welcome addition to the neighborhood and likely will go all but ignored.

But the same cannot be said of the large swaths of AKP supporters — like many residents of my neighborhood — that make up as much as half of Turkey’s 75 million people. For them, the çapulcu, the pot-banger, the terrorist and the coup plotter may soon be one and the same -- and the informant box may have its uses.


Originally published here, for Next City

When Police Abuse Surveillance Cameras

For Atlantic Cities

By David Lepeska

The ACLU has portrayed Chicago's extensive crime camera a system as a $60 million threat to privacy. Turns out Chicago police officers sometimes see the system as a threat to their privacy as well.

In the wee hours of June 13, 2009, a Chicago camera scanning a West Side neighborhood recorded a small, rowdy party taking place in a vacant lot. A young man standing in a nearby yard also comes into focus.

All of a sudden, the camera's circuitous route is interrupted, diverted back to the party and then pointed at an empty stretch of sidewalk. It stays on that spot for about 10 minutes, and when it returns to its regular rotation we see not one, not 10, but 19 police cars on the street next to the party. In the intervening period, police had arrived in force to break up a fight.

Torri Hamilton, the lawyer of the young man who had been standing in the yard – and was subsequently charged with resisting arrest, though later cleared – says police officers went in with mace and billy clubs to disperse the crowd.

Chicago's police-run crime cameras require manual control to be diverted from their usual scan. To Hamilton, the re-positioning of this camera, at essentially nothing, suggests the police, after receiving a call about the fight, had diverted the camera so that their use of force would not be recorded.

Jody Weis, former head of the Chicago Police Department, concurs with this diagnosis. He told a reporter from radio station WBEZ:

Weis says it's not too much of a stretch to think officers would divert the cameras. He says when he was in charge they had a problem with officers turning off the cameras in their cars, "and I think it was because people had a fear, we don't want this camera recording what we're doing and I don't know how many times I spent and said 'Guys, if you're doing your job correctly this camera's your greatest friend.'"

All of which suggests that the monitoring of cameras, thought to be one of the keys to successful crime camera systems, is susceptible to not just incompetence, but also abuse.

This fear of being caught in the act of using excessive force can be traced to the infamous Rodney King incident of 1991, in which a bystander captured Los Angeles police officers beating King with batons after a high-speed chase. Footage of the baton beating later sparked widespread riots.

Apparently, diversions of crime cameras are not uncommon. Along with their recently published study on the effectiveness of crime camera systems, the Urban Institute released a handy guide for officials planning on implementing their own surveillance plan. The authors warned: "cameras may be diverted to another viewable area when an incident occurs and catch little or nothing of the incident itself."

The report neglected to mention who might do the diverting.



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Ran December 2011:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2011/12/surveillance-cameras-threat-police-privacy/806/

Are Crime Cameras Worth the Money?

For Atlantic Cities

By David Lepeska

In May 2010, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American drove his Nissan Pathfinder into one of the most scrutinized urban spaces on the planet and parked along the curb.

In the hours that followed, more than 80 city surveillance cameras – as well as dozens of private cameras, constant media feeds and amateur tourist videographers - failed to capture an image of Faisal Shahzad and his suspicious, fertilizer-packed SUV in Times Square. All those electronic eyes couldn't even provide police investigators an image of the suspect (the balding middle-aged man standing near the vehicle in popular security footage had nothing to do with the case).

Instead, a street vendor pointed out the smoking Pathfinder to mounted police officers, leading to Shahzad's capture more than 50 hours later. In the end it wasn't high-tech 21st century surveillance that caught the crook, but good old-fashioned community vigilance. "The successful model for getting the alleged 'bad guy,''' wrote the Boston Globe, "is more Sam Spade than Jack Bauer."

For years, video surveillance has been seen as a potent weapon in the fight against urban crime. The Department of Homeland Security lays out millions of dollars to throw a surveillance net on our cities. Last year, it spent more than $830 million in 64 metropolitan areas as part of its Urban Area Security Initiative – up from $15 million and seven cities for the same program in 2009. This year the total is $662 million across 31 cities.

Yet the question of effectiveness has haunted governments, police officials and academic researchers for decades. It should also haunt taxpayers, because camera surveillance doesn't come cheap. London's 10,000 camera system, for example, has cost more than $320 million to set up and maintain.

The answer, thus far, has been decidedly mixed. Studies in San Francisco and London – two cities on opposite sides of the camera-density spectrum – found little to cheer. San Francisco's 68 cameras placed in high-crime areas failed to reduce assaults, sex offenses and robbery, and merely moved murder down the block, according to a UC-Berkeley report.

London city data revealed that police were no more likely to catch the perpetrators of crimes committed in camera-dense areas than in other boroughs, suggesting no link between more cameras and better crime solving.

A 2009 meta-analysis by researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Cambridge examined 44 previous studies and turned up some positive results. They found surveillance systems to be most effective in parking lots, cutting crime by 51 percent. Cameras in public transport areas – at subway stations, on trains and at bus stops – generally reduced crime by almost one quarter. And camera systems in public settings cut crime by about seven percent.

Britain – with as many as 4 million cameras across the country – accounted for the majority of these reductions.

Now comes a rigorous new study from the Urban Institute, analyzing surveillance systems in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which has invested more than $16 billion to advance community policing at the state and local levels since 1994, sponsored the study, released in September.

The researchers focused on select high crime areas where cameras had recently been installed and studied crime statistics going as far back as 2001 to include before and after data. In Baltimore, crime fell by 25 percent in one area, 10 percent in another and yet stayed the same in a third. In Washington, cameras appeared to have no effect on criminal activity.

In Chicago, the country's most extensive, integrated network, cameras in Humboldt Park correlated to a 12 percent decline in overall crime, including a 33 percent reduction in drug offenses and robberies and a 20 percent drop in violent crime. Meanwhile, a second Chicago area of study, West Garfield Park, saw no crime drop.

The Urban Institute researchers made two important advances over previous studies. First, they reviewed each cities' decision-making process, the set-up of the surveillance system and finally usage. They found that active monitoring by trained personnel had a greater impact than cameras merely left to record video for later use, in the event of a crime in that area. They also found that costs, if not monitored, can spiral out of control.

Second, the researchers devised a system for calculating the social and governmental costs of various crimes, including expenses related to arrest, pre-sentencing, incarceration and cost to victim. “No prior research has sought to explore the degree to which camera use is cost-beneficial—a critical inquiry in light of the economic challenges currently being experienced by jurisdictions across the country,” they wrote in the executive summary.

Under their system, murder costs $1.4 million, aggravated assault $89,000, robbery $120,000 and rape just $62,000. Baltimore saved $1.50 for every dollar spent on crime cameras, according to the report. The crimes prevented in Humboldt Park saved Chicago a whopping $4.30 for every dollar spent on both the Humboldt and West Garfield systems.

In the end, the Urban Institute researchers offer a handy guide for city officials and law enforcement agencies, with tips from the reasonable (“assess your needs and budget before investing,”) to the mundane (“weigh the costs and benefits of using active monitoring”).

Their best advice is to manage expectations about the impact of crime camera systems: “Footage quality may be adversely impacted by darkness, inclement weather, equipment damage or dirt;” "Images can be grainy, cloudy, or otherwise unclear;" and “cameras may be diverted to another viewable area when an incident occurs and catch little or nothing of the incident itself."

Aaron Doyle, a criminologist at Carleton University who is part of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University and co-editor of a book out next month called Eyes Everywhere: The Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, sees this study as consistent with previous work.

"The worst-case scenario is that these positive results in two of the three cities will be over-hyped and lead to the kind of mega-expensive runaway train that CCTV has been in Britain,” says Doyle. “It is possible that a modest well-planned network could be part of a range of measures that would help in some limited contexts, but I think crime is better dealt with in ways that build and involve community."

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Originally ran December 12, 2011, at:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2011/12/crime-cameras-worth-the-money/693/