Debate over surveillance in public housing reveals concerns of systematic injustices

As the debate over the constitutionality of surveillance in public housing, some believe the surveillance system is oppressive

WASHINGTON – There are dome-shaped cameras outside of Schyla Pondexter-Moore’s home – a daily reminder that she and her neighbors in public housing are being watched. 

The cameras appear on top of nearly half of every home in Highland Dwellings, her Southeast, D.C. community. Pondexter-Moore says that the cameras monitor residents every move outside but can also see into their homes if their blinds are open.  

“Just because we are in public housing doesn’t mean we don’t have any rights and that we should have to be watched like animals in a zoo,” says Pondexter-Moore, 46.

Pondexter-Moore is one of several residents concerned about their right to privacy in public housing according to a recently filed lawsuit against the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA). While the agency argues that the cameras are necessary to promote public safety in the district’s public housing, experts are divided on whether the cameras do indeed deter crime, which has been ticking up this year in the district.  

Dome-shaped cameras have been installed on nearly every home in Southeast DC's Highland Dwelling's community.

Overall crime in the nation’s capital so far is up 25% compared to 2022, according to government statistics.  Pondexter-Moore doesn’t think the cameras will deter crime and keep her three children away from it.

“Everything I do is for my kids,” Pondexter-Moore says. “I want them to live in a place they can be proud of and feel safe.”

The 80 cameras quietly began appearing in August 2017, installed by contractors for DCHA. The cameras are a part of the agency’s surveillance program for public housing that includes 650 others. The surveillance program is in partnership with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to, “address public safety concerns,” the lawsuit filed by the Georgetown University Law Center on behalf of Pondexter-Moore alleges.

When called, someone identifying themselves as a DCHA representative declined a request for comment.

A D.C. city council initiative published in April 2006 says, “Protecting life and property is essential in the long-term viability of the housing stock.” The initiative says making physical security improvements that include surveillance cameras, access control centers, fences, and lighting systems improves public safety.

Some experts, such as Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, says that installing intrusive cameras reinforces the preconceived notion that predominantly African American and low-income neighborhoods need to be more heavily policed and surveilled because the crime rates are higher in these communities than others in D.C.

“The issue of public safety is that it has been handled improperly throughout public housing,” Smith says. “Talking to people who live [in public housing] could help us better understand what needs to be done, but I don’t think it’s more police and surveillance.”

Schyla Pondexter-Moore is calling for the removal of all 80 cameras in the Highland Dwellings community and to hold a meeting with community officials to discuss how to re-invest the money used to install the cameras into community building programs.

“No one, not DCHA, the Mayor, no one has asked us what should be done to make our neighborhoods feel safer for us,” Pondexter-Moore says. “We just wanted to know who was watching us and why we were being watched.”

Pondexter-Moore says she and her neighbors would like to see the practice of unconstitutional levels of surveillance in low-income neighborhoods dismantled.

“I don’t see this happening in any other neighborhood, besides the poor ones,” Pondexter-Moore says.

“The thing I find most concerning about all of this is how it is based upon a premise of what actually creates public safety that I think is entirely false,” Smith says. He believes dehumanizing living conditions in public housing are to blame for the public safety concerns.

According to research done by the Capital News Service, D.C. has 2.5 times more CCTV cameras in majority people-of-color neighborhoods than any other major city in the U.S, with Washington’s Congress Heights, Bellevue, and Washington Highlands (which includes Highland Dwellings) being areas with the most surveillance cameras.

“We can’t law enforcement our way into some form of public safety in the communities that legitimately have safety concerns because those safety concerns don’t emerge out of the fact that we don’t have enough police [or] we don’t have enough surveillance,” Smith says.

DC has about 782 police officers per 100,000 residents, the highest in the country, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There are approximately 43 police departments in DC, including the DCHA police department that patrols public housing communities such as Highland Dwellings. Despite being heavily policed, crime has continued to increase year-over-year with violent crime increasing by 2% and property crime increasing 28%.

Despite efforts by DCHA to promote public safety, according to a 2023 report by the Neighborhood Scout, an online database of U.S. neighborhood analytics, the Washington Highlands region, which includes the Highland Dwellingsneighborhood, has one of the highest crime rates in the country with approximately 1,716 crimes taking place per square mile. That’s three times more than the DC average, and over 64 times the national average.

Smith pointed to a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that found DCHA had failed to provide decent, safe, and sanitary housing conditions for some of its residents. “Fixing those properties and making them decent places to live would be a pretty big safety initiative,” he said.  All of the policing and surveillance does very little to create safety, Smith asserts.

“It may create the perception of safety, but it just means more people go to jail,” which he says does not create public safety. He says the surveillance cameras create “public insecurity.”

However, not everyone agrees.

Karen Amendola, who has a doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology and is the chief behavioral scientist for the National Policing Institute, says having more surveillance cameras makes communities safer by helping solve more crimes.

“Police can be dispatched while a crime is taking place, which helps to increase our clearance rate, making communities safer,” Amendola[1]  says. “A clearance rate is the number of crimes solved versus the number of crimes committed.”

Although current research is limited on how much the surveillance cameras themselves deter crime in neighborhoods like Highland Dwellings, data supports the notion that having footage after a crime has been committed increases the likelihood that the perpetrator is caught, according to Amendola.  “[The footage] is used to aid in arrests and support criminal investigations and prosecutions and is better to have, than not in those cases,” she says.

According to an interview of a “former-burglar-turned-security-consultant” Luke Harris, by Tech Radar, burglars are less likely to break into homes with visible security cameras. However, there is little data available on the crime rate of neighborhoods of public housing communities like Highland Dwellings before the surveillance cameras were installed to see how the crime rate was affected.

Some community members and advocates like April Goggans, an organizer for Black Lives Matter D.C., argue that the surveillance cameras are being used to persecute and control people living in lower income communities.

She says police officers are constantly watching them via the footage from the 650 cameras across the city, conducting “jump out,” operations - the practice of multiple officers “jumping” out of unmarked patrol cars at once on residents doing what could be considered “suspicious activities,” such as playing dice games, gathering outside their homes in large numbers, or playing their music too loud.

“These are our neighborhoods,” Goggans says. “We live here, our families are here, we go to school and work here, [we] shop [here], and built our lives whole here. When you live in a place that is underinvested in and where Black people are constantly subjected by police presence and harassment, of course crime will evolve from that.”

Dustin Sternbeck, Director of the Office of Communications for MPD, says building community trust between law enforcement and the neighborhoods they serve is the key to public safety.

“If the community doesn’t trust [law enforcement], then it is hard to do our jobs of making [the community] feel safe,” Sternbeck says. “Residents who do not trust law enforcement are less likely to call the police when something happens, leading to the prevalence of surveillance cameras.”

The case is currently in mediation, “a process in which a mediator facilitates communication and negotiation between parties to assist them in reaching a voluntary agreement regarding their dispute,” according to the D.C. Law Librarywebsite.

Neither set of lawyers for Pondexter-Moore or DCHA could be reached for comment.

While the public waits to hear the outcome of the lawsuit, some public housing residents are concerned about the precedent it could set.

Damond Loney, 50, a Highland Dwelling resident, says he is worried that if Pondexter-Moore does not win the lawsuit, then it is only the beginning of the over surveillance epidemic in public housing communities.

“[The cameras] are already outside of our houses, pointed inside of them,” he says. “What would be next is them putting the cameras inside your house for real to watch your every move. That isn’t right at all.”

can you re-read this sentence and fix the attribution?/the set up?