The political balance between safety and liberty is hardly unique to our generation, but in these times of terrorism and downtown crime waves, liberty has been making a grand escape at an alarming rate, and, worse yet, few are protesting.
Madison — a supposed bastion of liberal and progressive values — recently has taken steps to challenge liberty's value by proposing a plan to allow police to use mobile cameras to catch, identify and put Madison's criminals behind bars. The plan's aim is, of course, safety, but it comes at the expense of greater liberty and your natural rights to privacy.
Madison's current plan is a familiar story, as cities across the country have taken similar steps to combat their growing crime rates. With the newfound allure of downtown, cities have been faced with the growing importance of protecting their newest, wealthiest tenants.
But with the influx of these wealthy residents comes a problem of controlling crime, as these suburban émigrés make easy targets for savvy criminals. The supposed solution is cameras, and many cities have sought to use them to gain a leg up in their fight against crime.
While cameras in their function are ultimately no different from a police patrol, they capture and see everything. Their permanence is terrifying, but even more terrifying is their potential for abuse. As reported in the Wisconsin State Journal, the plan to utilize cameras in the downtown area has no policy to combat this potential for abuse. This means police could be eyeing up the pretty girl next door and not the drug deal across the street.
Without a strong policy on how the cameras are supposed to be used, Madison's police department could be in for a heap of trouble. Legal challenges could be just the start, but the moral predicament the cameras pose is more threatening than simple litigation ever could be.
Part and parcel to liberty is the idea of privacy, and while its definition is a matter of great dispute among liberals and conservatives, basic tenets remain agreeable. The vision of police on every street corner watching your every move is an Orwellian concept that even law-abiding citizens would reject, and rightfully so.
The fear of the total-information authoritarian state is hardly divorceable from an intrusive police presence similar to this, and that is precisely what cameras represent. While cameras in their own right may violate no explicit U.S. constitutional right, they are hardly within the spirit of the laws that we so humbly protect.
As liberty is a concept beyond our Constitution, so is morality; and despite what your law professor might tell you, simply because something is legally right, does not mean that it is morally right. While many will respond to these concerns by pointing to the assumption that if you are not a criminal, then you need not worry, they forget that some things that are legal are also private, if not embarrassing at times.
Knowledge of legal activities such as where you go to eat, whom you are dating and what prescription medicine you are taking — most would consider this private information. However, as gauged by the apparent lack of concerned voices apart from the ACLU and City Council President Austin King, citizens are content with sharing some of the more intimate details about their lives with complete strangers — the police.
It is high time to evaluate the effectiveness of this plan before we sign away our liberty and personal lives. Liberty and safety need not be presented in such dichotomous terms for public policy, as liberty from the state is as important to our safety as protection from criminals.
After all, what is the point of being safe, if we are not free?
Robert Phansalkar ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in languages and cultures of Asia and political science.
