Real Time Crime Center and Peregrine Contract Raise Privacy Concerns

Image credit: City of Durham

As a Durham resident, I’m deeply concerned by Durham’s plans to launch a Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) and enter into contract with Peregrine Technologies. RTCCs, like automated license plate readers (ALPRs), are rapidly cropping up across the US, as companies like Peregrine and Flock have been aggressively marketing the use of big data and algorithms in policing.

The city of Durham is arguing that the RTCC, which includes Peregrine adoption, will make Durham a “Safer Community” and an “Innovative and High-Performance Organization.” This argument is ludicrous on its face. Safer for who? Innovative how?

RTCCs are police units that collect, store, and analyze enormous amounts of data using new technologies designed to facilitate mass surveillance and predictive policing. Durham’s Police Department (DPD) will feed Peregrine’s software data from police reports, body cameras, digital evidence, ALPRs, emergency call records, mobile pings, and social media, and potentially additional data from data brokers. This data will then be used by Peregrine’s platform to guide decisions, including how and where to allocate public resources and who to target in investigations.

This “data-driven policing” enables law enforcement agencies to track, record, and profile members of the public in real time, and easily exchange troves of information with other law enforcement agencies. Data dashboards, social network analysis, and other common tech tools can not only reveal to DPD and other law enforcement agencies who you and I associate with, histories of crises in our families and neighborhoods, and where we travel but, by keeping meticulous record of every person and place, inevitably entangle us all in criminal justice systems. In a nutshell, these technologies, by collecting and storing expansive arrays of data, undermine our 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and throw our rights to privacy in the trash.

While we will all be impacted, we will not be impacted equally. We must remember that these tools do nothing to address systemic racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination in policing. As a result, marginalized groups and the places they live or frequent will be disproportionately impacted as historically biased police data is fed into RTCC tools and programs. Research (including that published in books like Surveil and Predict and in reports by the NAACP and American Bar Association) has shown that data-driven policing, which necessarily relies on biased police data, further entrenches discrimination.

In recent listening sessions, Police Chief Patrice Andrews has shared that the RTCC is meant to be a “force multiplier” to make their work more “efficient.” That is, in light of staffing shortages, DPD wants to rely on tech to guide their responses and investigations.

However, police provide a public service that carries with it a profound potential for negative consequences for us and our neighbors; officers carry lethal weapons and involvement in the criminal justice system, whether one is arrested, on trial, or incarcerated, has monumental personal and financial costs. Considering the fundamental unreliability of historical police data, and the present unreliability of machine-driven methods, the chances of harms befalling us all as a result of this hasty plan is far too great.

The RTCC will inevitably cost millions, and we should not be wasting this money on carceral systems now. Decades of science have already shown that the best way to reduce crime is to invest in people. Housing reduces crime. Healthcare reduces crime. Access to food and quality education reduce crime. Policing, and especially policing enhanced by tech, is not the answer. Inequalities and economic insecurities are at a historic high right now, and we should be investing in addressing that root problem. The RTCC and its Peregrine platform endanger us and our civil liberties. Cities across the country are rejecting mass surveillance and mass data extracting companies. Just this year, Charlottesville rejected Peregrine, Hillsborough and Austin rejected Flock, and Nashville rejected Fusus.

Durham should abandon these plans. Our city has been on the right track by expanding the truly innovative HEART program and Community Safety Department, adopting the 4th Amendment Workplace resolution, and seeking other ways to protect its public from unconstitutional and harmful law enforcement practices and ensure we can all “safely [engage] in public life" (4th Amendment Workplace resolution). Building up an RTCC would not only be a step backwards, but upend all the progress we’ve made.