Stop Subway Surveillance Solutionism

Friend, People don’t feel safe on the subway. That’s the somber fact Governor Hochul shared at her press conference earlier this week, as she unveiled the state’s latest surveillance boondoggle, putting cameras in every carriage of the sprawling subway system. People may not feel safe, but the fact is that subways are safer, as the summer saw a 21% plunge in crime, going back to pre-pandemic levels. Surveillance often isn’t about safety, but about perception, and the two have never been farther apart. The headlines and videos are constantly hammering home the fear that makes so many second-guess how to navigate New York. And cameras will only widen the gap between the truth and what we believe. Cameras are great at capturing crime scenes for the evening news, but they’re terrible at doing as advertised and actually preventing crime. As I explained this week in an article for WIRED, this pattern has repeated itself over and over again for as long as we’ve had mass deployment of CCTV. Spending millions of dollars on thousands more cameras won’t address the real reasons that subway ridership is down: remote work and the changing nature of the office. Instead, the cameras will continue to show the subways at their worst, while doing nothing to make them safer. Reinvigorating New York’s economy is a hard problem, and sadly, simple surveillance solutions will never work. In solidarity, Albert Fox Cahn Executive Director  Share Tweet Forward Copyright © 2022 STOP, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.