[chatmasta]

Why do you have political capital to convince neighboring counties to copy your legislation, but not to copy your decision to remove the cameras?

(And you can still pass legislation restricting cameras even when they aren’t in your county…)

[tptacek]

Because regulating cameras is an easier sell than disabling them, because ordinary people do not share HN's priors about surveillance technology, like, at all.

[squigz]

I'm not sure I agree with this, unless by "ordinary people" you mean a particular group. In my experience, the vast majority of members of oppressed or marginalized groups are strongly against these things. The only people I know who defend it are those that can hide behind "if I'm not doing anything wrong what do I have to hide"

[tptacek]

It's not like we're going to have to argue about this in the abstract for long. Check in with me in a year and we'll see: are there more ALPRs or less ALPRs in the near west suburbs of Chicago? I would put money on a lot more. Dozens more were getting rolled out in our neighboring munis right as we announced we were canceling our contract.

[squigz]

I'm sure you're right, but that doesn't imply to me that "ordinary people" are okay with surveillance technology. At least 1 other explanation would be that they don't understand the implications.

Anyway, we'll check back in a year and see: are they actually effective and used responsibly? I would put money on "no"

[tptacek]

I'm not wondering about it; I've watched the two sides of this issue play out. Progressive activists turn out with stuff about surveillance and resisting the Trump administration (I'm sympathetic!) and liberals (we only have progressives and liberals here) turn out talking about public safety and how the camera enforcement is less racist than human discretionary enforcement (I'm sympathetic to that argument too, but as I've noted elsewhere on the thread: the cameras aren't effective here).

This played out over years here; I attended all the board meetings, transcribed them, took notes, kept tallies of who was saying what. I was involved in our last election and the two mayoral candidates squared off on this issue (among several others).