SLC police cameras — They see you, and you will see more of them

There are new cops on the beat in Salt Lake City.

They are big. They wear badges. They work around the clock without requiring a break. They fearlessly venture into some of the shadiest, scariest places. Yet they carry no handcuffs, no tasers, no guns. They are armed only with 24/7 cameras.

These steely police agents stand up to 22 feet tall and can see you from blocks away. Some might watch from a traffic intersection as you go by. Others might catch a glimpse of your morning jog or bike ride along the Jordan River.

Most residents have probably seen this new variety of all-seeing giants, known as remote surveillance cameras, mounted on towable trailers, and they are likely to see more.

Already a major tool for law enforcement in Utah’s capital, these technologically advanced camera systems are likely to play an increasing role under the city’s latest plan for stepping up public safety.

That includes an array of smaller boxy cameras, often mounted on poles, as well as a cadre of the taller ones on portable trailers, which cost up to $50,000 apiece and offer powerful capabilities, extendable necks reaching skyward and multiple sensors that can be guided remotely.

Cameras in general are among the latest go-to strategies being taken up as part of the Salt Lake City Police Department’s multipronged campaign to target more aggressively vagrancy and drug activity with a focus on downtown, in the Ballpark neighborhood and along the Jordan River.

In a sign of more to come, police stationed a trailer unit at 500 North and Redwood Road near the river, surveilling a stretch of the waterway recently closed by the city due to security fears from neighbors and trail users.

While police and residents eager for more enforcement may welcome these ever-vigilant eyes, civil liberties advocates point to this sort of expansion as another example of widening encroachment on personal privacy through government surveillance.

The American Civll Liberties Union says police cameras raise serious concerns for data security and privacy.

“Deploying more police cameras raises questions about how footage is stored, how long it’s kept, and whether AI or other invasive technologies are being used to filter images,” said Aaron Welcher, director of communications for the ACLU of Utah.

“Mass surveillance techniques and tools,” Welcher added, “often reinforce and increase disparities in our criminal legal system — violating civil rights and liberties under the guise of keeping the public safe.”

The Police Department counters that cameras provide a major deterrent to crime and support officers in the field by supplying them with vital intelligence.

“We can’t have police officers on every single corner,” department spokesperson Brent Weisberg said. “Nor can we have cameras on every single corner in our city.

“But what we can do,” he added, “is be strategic in our deployment of these public safety tools to improve our response and to help investigate calls for service and, ultimately, crimes that happen in our community.”

Noting that these cameras are deployed fluidly around the city to discourage crime or as on-the-spot investigative tools, Weisberg said the department doesn’t view or intend their use as surveillance, per se.

No one is currently monitoring what cameras capture around the clock, for example, so police don’t see their use as actively watching the public’s moves.

“This is about doing our law enforcement in a way that respects and supports the values of Salt Lake residents,” he said. “Under those values, our work is to make sure people don’t feel there is a sense of surveillance or constant monitoring.”

More cameras are coming

Police work already abounds with image-capturing devices, especially if you count near-ubiquitous dashboard and body cameras and audiovisual handhelds used to snapshot or record basic evidence. This new equipment, though, is different.

Mounted on hydraulic booms, the trailer-carried cameras can be towed to key locations and have sophisticated imaging systems and software, capable of beaming data live back to intelligence analysts at the department’s downtown headquarters.

They capture full-color forensic-quality imagery — even at night. Some units like this on the market have artificial-intelligence-supported facial recognition, but the city’s police spokesperson said those functions are not deployed on any of its cameras.

One of Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s 27 new strategies to improve public safety is to add 10 cameras to an existing fleet of roughly 60 pole-mounted and trailer units now used by the department.

Along with that, the city is seeking a Justice Department grant to buy an additional 14 fixed cameras and one more of the towering and most costly trailer units that police can position at any public thoroughfare — or, with the owner’s consent, on private property.

Utah’s largest police force also has added drones with cameras to its growing visual arsenal as part of dispatch, investigative, pursuit and supportive-firefighting operations.

The department will be using more drones, clearing sight lines of vegetation and adding fixed cameras along the Jordan River, Weisberg said, as part of the mayor’s strategies.

There’s new support emerging for deploying more security cameras in some city parks as well to assist police, park rangers and privately hired guards.

Longer term, Weisberg said, the department is working to have a real-time crime monitoring center, located at headquarters, in place and fed by up to 93 live cameras by sometime next year.

A longtime west-sider, near where police trailer cameras have occasionally been stationed, said they didn’t seem to be that much of a deterrent, especially, she added, when the Police Department lacks other resources to follow up.

“You can have somebody sitting there and monitoring them 24 hours a day,” Rose Park resident Angela Morgan said, “but if you don’t have officers nearby to respond to ongoing criminal activity, what good are they?”

How are these cameras used?

A significant portion of the unmarked trailer cameras, pole-mounted units and other surveillance devices the public might see — commonly in shopping center parking lots and on commercial buildings — are privately owned.

The Utah Department of Transportation also deploys scores if not hundreds of them to monitor traffic on state roads.

Police can seek access to private camera captures after the fact in specific investigations, according to Weisberg, but official policy says no privately owned devices are to be used for ongoing department surveillance.

That same policy calls for any police video surveillance in public areas to “be conducted in a legal and ethical manner while recognizing and protecting constitutional standards of privacy.”

That applies to all of what the department calls “overt” cameras, which are intentionally noticeable, the spokesperson said, and always affixed with a Salt Lake City police badge and usually with flashing red and blue lights — not least for their deterrent effect.

Officers authorized to use video surveillance equipment can “only monitor public areas and public activities where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists,” says the latest police manual. A supervisor, it adds, has to approve where every camera goes.

“Cameras may be placed in strategic locations throughout the city to detect and deter crime,” the manual reads, “to help safeguard against potential threats to the public, to help manage emergency response situations during natural and man-made disasters, and to assist city officials in providing services to the community.”

Police also have strict rules governing who has access to any images captured, ensuring they are stored securely and for logging and protecting them along with other evidence.

What’s driving the expansion?

After steadily adding technology to its policing for years, the city has reached a turning point as it faces intense pressure to improve public safety.

Former Police Chief Mike Brown, a 33-year veteran of the force, laid the groundwork for the real-time crime center before his departure earlier this year. Sources say Brown also brought an emphasis and leadership on adoption of new technologies and use of data in police work.

New chief Brian Redd, who worked for 21 years at the state Department of Public Safety, is also known for a strong focus on technology in policing from his ties to the Statewide Information and Analysis Center, Utah’s law enforcement intelligence unit.

“He has firsthand experience,” Weisberg said, “with how important it is for law enforcement to have a responsive information center and to have a pulse on what happens in our capital city.”

Some City Council members have called for more police cameras in the face of safety complaints from constituents.

For her part, Mendenhall argues they are an essential tool for the city to be more nuanced and effective in how it deploys police. She counts cameras, along with social workers, civilian teams and other ways of supporting officers in the field to make them more responsive.

Rather than a stand-alone emphasis on technology in policing, she said, her approach is more about extending the effectiveness of the city’s 630-officer force.

“The bottom line is,” the mayor said in an interview, “it’s about serving our community as quickly as we can and as well as we possibly can.”

“These are the realities,” she added, “of managing a growing city, growing downtown activation and growing population, with little increase in resources to grow our department as rapidly.”

What about privacy?

Groups in Utah such as the ACLU and the Libertas Institute have warned Utahns for years about encroaching and invasive government surveillance of many kinds, saying that rapid technical advances threaten to leapfrog state law.

In Salt Lake City’s case, civil liberties advocates worry about its use in targeting specific populations, including unsheltered individuals. The ACLU of Utah spokesperson said the latest expansion “looks less like public safety and more like an effort to displace people experiencing homelessness.”

“Whether it’s cameras or drones,” Welcher said, “these tools are often directed at already overpoliced and underprotected communities. The ACLU of Utah believes all individuals deserve their constitutional rights, dignity and privacy, regardless of housing status.”

Weisberg maintained that city police take seriously “a responsibility to all our community members to make sure that the work we are doing aligns with their values.” That includes respecting their privacy even as technology becomes more sophisticated.

“There’s a lot of technology out there that could revolutionize policing,” he said, “but is that the best fit for our department? Is it the best fit for Salt Lake?”

City Council Chair Chris Wharton, who is an attorney, said that as part of his support for the latest public safety approaches, he trusted the mayor to strike the right balance between privacy concerns and additional camera use.

“We have more detailed conversations [coming] about camera footage and how we can safeguard civil liberties,” said Wharton, adding that he has asked the city’s Racial Equity in Policing Commission, to weigh in on public safety proposals.

Mendenhall said the council, in turn, shares purview over that balance, including as part of its budget review on additional police equipment purchases and funding for related strategies. The mayor said in her nine years at City Hall, elected leaders “always had visibility into the department’s consideration of the suite of technologies offered.”

“The Police Department,” the mayor said, “has been very scrupulous about not invading the personal privacy of our citizens.”

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