With the blessing of Mayor Buddy Dyer and newly minted Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith, the city of Orlando announced a new initiative called Orlando Connect on Thursday.
That bland, corporate-speak is familiar for anyone who follows the ins and outs of mid-sized city administration. What the actual program entails is also familiar to residents of the City Beautiful, as Orlando Connect is merely the latest attempt by city officials to turn this town into a highly surveilled police state.
Orlando Connect hopes to convince local homeowners, property developers and business owners to integrate their own private cameras into Orlando’s existing network of surveillance cameras. As of this writing, 45 private citizens have opted-in to Orlando’s planned panopticon.
The network requires camera owners to pay to integrate their cameras into the system by purchasing a device from Georgia-based private security company Fusus that connects your camera to the wider network. This, too, is nothing new. The Orlando area is no stranger to partnering with private companies to make its citizens lives a little less private.
The Winter Park Police Department famously partnered with the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company Ring, appearing in promotional videos for the multi-billion-dollar company to tout the increased safety of lowering the bar for police searches. (Ring does require consent of the camera owners to share footage, but police are not required to get a warrant.) In addition, Ring has made it clear that they are willing to cooperate with police and courts above the heads of individual camera owners and refuses to share how much data they’ve passed on.
In Orlando, the cooperation between police departments and private surveillance companies went even further. In addition to their own partnership with Ring, the city launched a much-scrutinized facial recognition program with Amazon in 2017. Dubbed Rekognition, the program was a pilot for using artificial intelligence to identify people within view of city-owned cameras. That program allowed Orlando Police to upload a photo of a person of interest and be alerted if they appeared in front of a camera. That program fizzled out after over a year of glitches and privacy concerns.
While less technologically sophisticated, the new program leaders call Orlando Connect is no less insidious. The ostensible purpose of the program is to help “respond to, solve, and deter crime.” But police are like the proverbial mouse and cookie where offering them something in good faith can only end poorly.
In short, the entire program rests upon the remarkably well-built foundation in the US that the police are here to help you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Self-selecting among the most aggrieved and paranoid coupled with training lifted straight from the battlefields of recent imperial excursions in the Middle East has left the average police force with an unhealthy and adversarial view of the citizens they nominally protect.
As the ever-more-bloated budgets of police departments across the US can attest, police aren’t likely to give up a privilege once its been granted to them. Allowing them a peek into your life — via camera or otherwise — will never be the end of things.
Granting a police officer access to your home, car or camera can only end with that courtesy flipped back on you. Answering a cop’s questions is a surefire way to end up in custody, even if you believe you did nothing wrong. They are a hammer looking to nail the average citizen to the wall. Their status as barely sentient guns is so widely known that the worst corners of the internet regularly send heavily armed police to the homes of their enemies, knowing they won’t ask questions before breaking down a door.
The best advice for anyone dealing with police is to shut the fuck up. The only smart response to a cop asking to look around your home, your car or your camera’s files is monosyllabic: a clear “no.” Don’t give the Orlando Police access to your private cameras.