In less than a decade, New York City has come to rival London as the world's surveillance capital. A walk through Harlem could quickly confirm this—every step you take is captured on video. Passing by the General Grant Houses on 125th Street, you are picked up by police-operated cameras on the exterior of the red brick towers. Continuing eastward, a sign emblazoned with the slogan "NYPD Security Camera" catches your eye at the intersection with frederick Douglass Boulevard. fifteen feet above the street, two opaque globes attached to a blue-and-white box stenciled with the police department's insignia look down on you.
Walk six blocks north on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard to 131st Street, where an NYPD Sky Watch booth with tinted windows and surveillance cameras sits on risers across the street from the St. Nicholas Houses in rapidly gentrifying central Harlem. Return to 125th Street, and descend into the 2/3 subway station on Lenox Avenue. As you swipe your Metrocard and pass through the turnstile, you are picked up by a string of now-familiar globes, part of the MTA's Passenger Identification System currently being installed throughout the subway —to combat terrorism, according to the MTA. Although security cameras have been used by private and public entities for decades, they have proliferated exponentially since September 11.
A 1998 New York Civil Liberties Union survey identified 2,397 surveillance cameras at street level in Manhattan. In 2005, another NYCLU survey of Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village, Chinatown and central Harlem found 4,468 cameras in those four districts alone. In the private sector, cameras are installed in residential buildings and a wide variety of businesses. Estimates of the total number of cameras citywide range up to 40,000. Government has been a main proponent of this expansion, with technophile Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly the most outspoken advocates of expanded video surveillance throughout New York City. "In this day and age, if you think that cameras aren't watching you all the time, you are very naive," Bloomberg said during an October 2007 visit to London. "We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras." for his part, Kelly promotes video surveillance as an investigative tool and a safeguard against terrorism. "We've got an eye toward prevention," Kelly says. "I like cameras because they act as a deterrent." The largest public surveillance initiatives implemented so far in the city are run by New York City's housing authority, police department, department of transportation and department of education, as well as the MTA. Nationally, the Department of Homeland Security is promoting the use of surveillance technology by doling out millions of grant dollars to municipalities. Since 2003, DHS has handed out $23 billion to local governments for equipment and counterterrorism training; the department will not say how much goes toward cameras. Major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have tapped into this cash flow, shifting their focus from Cold War weapons systems to electronic monitoring. Technology companies like IBM and Genetec are also developing a raft of "smart camera" software, such as facial and behavioral recognition programs—which identify people and suspicious activity using databases and algorithms that can be overlaid onto existing digital camera systems.
The expansion of surveillance cameras troubles some. "We're seeing a whole new wave of video surveillance," says Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union's Liberty and Technology program. "The current wave is the efforts to tie together public and private surveillance, which creates the potential for a pervasive surveillance system to track people from block to block." Other concerns center around the use of surveillance to stifle political dissent by targeting and tracking demonstrators, and law enforcement's tendency to subject minorities and low-income citizens to higher scrutiny.
