ACLU worked with Brookline PAX, local residents on risks of increased government surveillance
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CONTACT: media@aclu.org
BROOKLINE -- The Brookline Town Meeting voted late last night to adopt a
resolution against the use of police surveillance cameras provided by the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The resolution calls on the Board of
Selectmen to halt a one-year trial use of the cameras and to take them
down.
This is the first time that a town meeting -- an institution
of local New England democratic government, with more than two hundred members
-- has debated and rejected government surveillance cameras in a town's public
spaces. Brookline now joins Cambridge, where the City Council voted 9-0 in
February to oppose the installation of eight surveillance cameras obtained with
the same DHS grant.
"We are grateful to town meeting members in
Brookline who understood that a message needed to be sent, that America should
not be a place where the government is watching us as we go about our activities
in public," said Sarah Wunsch, a Brookline resident and staff attorney for the
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. The ACLU worked with
Brookline PAX and concerned residents to educate the community about the
increasing government surveillance of lawful activities and the creation of
government databases on vast numbers of Americans.
State
Representative Frank Smizik of Brookline spoke in favor of the resolution at
Town Meeting, saying that "Brookline has always been a leader" and that this was
a time when that leadership was needed to protect our values as a free
society.
The Town Meeting vote followed months of public hearings
and debates, with many residents objecting to the town's acceptance of the Bush
administration's offer of millions of dollars for digital interlinked cameras to
watch our public places. Although the cameras were justified by town
officials as "free" and as needed to help with evacuations, prevent crime or
terrorism, or aid in prosecutions, studies provide no evidence that the cameras
are effective. Rather, improved lighting and community policing have been
shown effective in preventing and solving crime.
The cameras were
intended to form part of a network funded with a $4.6 million Department of
Homeland Security grant linking nine Greater Boston communities.