We’re being watched, or are we? Tacoma camera fiasco pokes holes in surveillance society
A Tacoma cop for nearly 25 years, Ed Baker was a pioneer when the police department entered the age of video evidence analysis.
He was a leader in the field when two cameras were installed on the downtown Tacoma Bridge of Glass as part of an emergency city contract — cameras that have long since been neglected, according to recent reports by TNT staff writer Debbie Cockrell.
Baker has seen it all when it comes to the brave new world of Americans being recorded, often without knowing it, virtually 24-7. Now running his own video consultant shop, he knows as well as anyone the prophetic truth of what George Orwell wrote in his dystopian masterpiece,“1984,”: Big Brother is watching you.
“When I started teaching video forensics in the early 2000s, we had a standard saying that the average person is caught on camera 20, 30, 40 times a day,” Baker told me in a phone conversation this week. “I would venture to say it’s in the thousands now.”
Yet he also knows the limits of the technology, the challenges of extracting useful information from thousands of hours of recorded images and the lax oversight of humans to ensure these systems function properly — or at all.
Talk to him for a while like I did, and you get a sense that our surveillance society might not be surveilling us quite to the extent many of us assume.
Dummy cameras have proliferated at homes and places of business, while government cameras sometimes go dormant because of bureaucracy or budget cuts.
One could argue that’s not the worst thing in a country where privacy rights have been sacrificed at the altar of property and public safety.
But promoting a false sense of security can breed distrust and anger when the facts come out, as with the revelation that the cameras on the I-705 pedestrian overpass haven’t worked for years — and that nobody with the city or the Museum of Glass can say if they were ever used.
Or consider how decoy cameras on Bay Area Rapid Transit trains in California went unnoticed for years. BART officials didn’t fix this shocking negligence until someone was shot to death on a train in 2016, no video footage of the killer was available and journalists started poking around.
(I checked with Pierce Transit and Sound Transit officials this week; they said their bus and train cameras are fully operational. Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State History Museum and LeMay car museum officials also said their cameras are live and working fine.)
Baker summed up the public’s surveillance ambivalence this way: “It’s a love-hate relationship with these cameras.”
I tracked him down after the TNT broke the story about the inactive bridge cameras. The news came to light when Dr. Anthony Chen, the local health department director, reported being assaulted on the overpass after midnight May 19. Cockrell requested video records, but the city had none.
Baker wasn’t hard to find. Since 2003, when he became a certified forensic video analyst, he’s operated Video Consultants NW, a Pierce County company that specializes in on-site security, criminal investigation assistance and expert testimony.
He cut his teeth on this stuff as a Tacoma cop from 1985 to 2009. He stood up TPD’s first video forensic unit and capped his career with 10 years as a major crimes detective.
Remember the Tacoma Mall shootings in 2005, when a gunman wounded six people and held hostages for hours? Baker investigated the scene and was dismayed to find dummy cameras in an adjoining store.
When I asked about the bridge cameras installed in 2003 at a price of nearly $35,000 — much more than they’d cost today — Baker said he had no memory of the emergency contract. But he’s not surprised the system went dark, given the vagaries of city budget cycles.
“It’s one of those stepchild-type things, where they can be neglected and eventually nobody gives it a second thought,” he said.
Even if the cameras had been working, Baker said they likely wouldn’t have captured identifiable images of Chen’s reported assailant. “You’d have to be within 150 feet of the cameras to have any chance.”
He’s found similar limitations in his analysis of police body camera video; it often shows little more than the side of a squad car, or closeups of an officer’s arms or legs. As cities spend millions to record, store and respond to requests for body-cam footage, thoughts of needles and haystacks come to mind.
Finding the right surveillance balance may seem impossible at a time when more law enforcement agencies — including Tacoma and Pierce County — have activated body cameras, while other governments — such as King County — have banned police use of facial-recognition technology.
Elected leaders must carefully weigh the competing expectations, not leave the public hanging in uncertainty or distrust.
Then again, the government may have nothing to lose by keeping us in suspense.
For me, it’s helpful to return to Orwell’s classic vision. (What else would you expect from a proud product of Olympia High School, Class of 1984?)
With dull metal telescreens blanketing the land of Oceania — sometimes spying, sometimes not — the proles remain helplessly under the thumb of The Party.
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any moment,” Winston Smith, the protagonist, says.
In other words, Big Brother is watching you. Unless he isn’t.
Do we go about life feeling like victims of voyeurism either way? Or accept it as the price of feeling more secure?
Reach News Tribune opinion editor Matt Misterek at matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com