Backscatter vans, crowd dispersal microwaves, lasers that make you vomit—welcome to the future of law enforcement, and all the icky questions the technology raises.
Last
month, the local press in New York confirmed what civil rights
advocates had been saying for years: the NYPD has been driving around in
unmarked vans chock full of X-ray equipment and scanning for...
something.
It was a major
story, mostly because not much is known about “Z Backscatter” vans other
than that they cost somewhere between $729,000 and $825,000. Yet,
there’s no way to know for sure what they're capable of because the NYPD
refuses to talk about them, even though the ACLU won a lawsuit that
required the department to reveal records about the vans (including
their potential health impacts on people who might be exposed to X-rays
without knowing it). “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are
all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the
case, we’ll see them in court—where they’ll lose!” Commissioner Bill
Bratton told the New York Post.
The
X-ray vans bring up all kinds of concerns about privacy, health, and
general ickiness—no one wants to walk around New York wondering whether
some bored cop in a van is checking out your skivvies—but by today’s
police tech standards, the vans are actually relatively low-tech and
benign. Departments large and small are using a host of new gadgets—from
laser light weapons that can induce vomiting to surveillance systems
that can predict crimes before they happen.
And
what’s scariest of all is the majority of these technologies are being
funneled down from the U.S. Military, down into neighborhoods that are
most definitely not war zones. “After 15 years of war, there’s a demand
for all these companies to find new markets for all these technologies,”
said Joel Pruce a professor of human rights at the University of Dayton
who studies police technology. “So it trickles down from the military
to police.” The revelations about the backscatter vans were just one
more sign that the future of policing is here, and it's terrifying.
Here's a glimpse of what's out there.
There’s
a video from the U.S. Military that shows soldiers acting like mock
protesters in a grassy field. Then, a vehicle with what looks like a
satellite on top shows up, and the protesters scatter. If it weren’t for
the narrator on the video, you wouldn't be able to tell why: they’re
being microwaved.
The pain ray cannon (“Active Denial System” in police-talk) is essentially a microwave for humans. It uses microwave beams
to stimulate a body’s water and fat molecules and heat up people until
they run away. The system isn’t currently in use, but it’s being tested
and could theoretically wind up at local police departments soon.
But
there are already some weapons in use that make the old-fashioned forms
of breaking up protests—batons and tasers and the like—seem like
antiquities. There’s the sound cannon, a favorite
of the NYPD. The tool, technically called a Long Range Acoustic Device
(probably because that sounds less destructive than a sound canon)
transmits a super-loud high-pitched scream that can, “shape the behavior
of potential threats.” The sound is so loud it’s literally too painful
to be around. It can also cause hearing loss. The sound cannon is used
in many departments, from New York to Toronto to Ferguson, Missouri.
The other increasingly popular crowd control device: the “dazzler” laser gun, which looks like it was designed by Sigourney Weaver’s Alien
prop stylist. Cops can hold the weapon and shoot out rays of laser
light to disorient people who might be approaching them, restricted
areas, or causing any sort of ruckus. “You can’t look directly at it or
you become extremely disoriented,” said Lindsey J. Bertomen, a retired
police officer, criminal justice professor and weapons reviewer for PoliceOne.
“If the timing is done correctly you lose balance and fall off your
feet. Even the person using it has to be careful and not look directly
at it either.”
If you want
to prevent eye damage, you can’t look directly at it either—a soldier in
Iraq once accidently flashed the dazzler in his rearview mirror, and
damaged the retina of a soldier sitting behind him.
The
real boom market these days is in surveillance technology. It’s
impossible to know just how much is being used by police departments,
and at what cost—there’s no central clearinghouse for information about
local police departments—but it’s likely if you’re walking outside in a
city these days, you’re being recorded. The market for video
surveillance alone grew from $11.5 billion in 2008 to $37.5 billion in
2015. One estimate says there are 30 million surveillance cameras across
the country, and those are being used in new and invasive ways.
Facial recognition software
(another wartime import) is being used in dozens of police departments.
In 2014, the Boston Police Department was caught testing out new facial recognition software
made by IBM on an unsuspecting crowd of music festival attendees.
According to the ACLU, departments are also experimenting with ways to
gain access to and link together networks of private security cameras so
they can expand their surveillance without installing new hardware. And
body cameras, which police reform advocates thought
might be a great way to hold cops accountable after a spate of killings
of unarmed black men and women this year, could instead be used as
surveillance devices.
But
thousands of surveillance cameras monitoring street corners is a pretty
inefficient way to monitor an entire city or county, so now police are
figuring out ways to monitor large groups of people from the sky. In
several cities departments have deployed planes with high-resolution cameras that, paired with software, can tag and trace people as they move over many miles.
“What
if at some point they decide not to follow a burglary, but to follow
activists back to their house?” Pruce said. “There are often no checks
and balances.”
If you were worried you’d make it through this article without a reference to The Minority Report, too bad, here it comes: Predictive policing is all the rage these days. Cops are using software programs that use algorithms to analyze surveillance, GPS coordinates, and crime data to pinpoint specific areas where, and specific people who, might at some point commit a crime.
Here’s
how it works: computers compile a bunch of information—historical crime
data, known associations between people who’ve committed crimes in the
past (and even their associations social media networks) and the
location info about where crimes have been committed—analyze that data
using, and spit out a list of names of people who might be at risk of
committing a crime. Say you've dealt drugs at one point in your life,
you live in a high-crime area, and you tweeted something about smoking
weed recently—a piece of predictive policing software might tell cops to pay a visit to your house. It’s basically Minority Report minus those women in the pool.
The
Chicago PD now has a program where police do preventative visits to
dozens of young men whom the department’s algorithm has determined are
at risk of committing a crime. In one survey, 70 percent of police
departments said they were using some kind of predictive policing.
“Policing in the future is going to be about managing information on a
large scale” said Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at UC Davis who studies
police technology. “They want to be like Amazon or Google and collect
as much data as possible.”
The
problem from a civil rights perspective is that data isn’t neutral—many
crimes never go recorded, and the ones that are recorded are often a
product of controversial, potentially racist policing, like
stop-and-frisks in black neighborhoods. The algorithms have the
potential to intensify the biases that already exist in police
departments.
All told, these new technologies are only as good as the people using them (i.e. cops), and if the last year in policing was any indicator,
law enforcement aren’t great at moderating their use of any tool they
get their hands on, which is a frightening thought, considering those
tools include tanks. These new devices require tons of radical (and
expensive) training and new policy, something local municipalities are
hesitant to create under the watchful eye of the public. Police
departments, however, say that they’re implementing these technologies
in ways that don’t violate the civil rights of Americans. “It’s actually
pretty tedious to introduce new technology,” Bertomen said. “It’s a
liability-prone environment, so training takes a long time.”
The
problem is, it’s hard for the public to know whether that’s true. As
the NYPD’s reluctance to even acknowledge their X-ray vans shows, police
are resistant to opening up their process to scrutiny. “It’d be nice if
law enforcement worked hand in hand with civil rights groups to figure
this stuff out,” Pruce said. “But that doesn’t seem likely to happen.”