What is Community Control Over Police Surveillance?
The proliferation in local police departments’ use of surveillance technology, which in most places has occurred without any community input or control, presents significant threats to civil rights and civil liberties.
The Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) framework allows for the use of surveillance technologies, but only after a rigorous, transparent, public review that would enable the public to ask questions about and reject surveillance uses that place vulnerable communities at even greater risk.
CCOPS laws have been adopted in 26 jurisdictions from coast to coast, including Madison, Wisconsin and St. Louis, Missouri.
Here is a list of costly and invasive surveillance technologies that might be recording you, your family, and your neighbors right now in Milwaukee.
What’s at Stake?
As we highlighted in an open letter to the Common Council, we are already seeing how surveillance technology is being weaponized in real time.
Data gathered from facial recognition, automated license plate readers, artificial intelligence, and other surveillance tools are being used by governments, including our own, to target and detain individuals.
ICE – which has sent innocent American residents to gulags in El Salvador, is rapidly expanding its surveillance interface in local communities. Surveillance is being used to monitor and prosecute political protesters, people seeking and providing reproductive health care, and LGBTQ+ communities. These are not projections — these are present-day realities carried out by bad actors within the federal government and local jurisdictions.
