total time: 16.9 minutes
total words: 591
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. Thank you both for being here with us today. If you don't mind just starting by introducing yourselves with your name and pronouns and just a bit about who you are.
[Jean Zotter]: Great. I'm Jean Zotter. I use she, her pronouns. And I'm part of a grassroots group in Medford called Medford People Power. And we're affiliated with the ACLU. And we work on protecting civil rights, civil liberties in Medford, Massachusetts. And I can say more about them later.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah. Great, and I'm Kit Collins, my pronouns are she, her, hers, and I'm a Medford City Councilor and I was a co-sponsor of the ordinance project that we worked on with Jean and Medford People Power this past year.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you both. So we will talk a little bit more about the topic of sea crops. We'll get into a little bit more about what that means and how you both worked on that. But before we get into it, I want to ask you both the question that we ask everybody on the podcast. Kit, you've answered this before, but maybe you have a different answer this time. And the question is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Jean Zotter]: Well, I knew you were going to ask this question, so I've been thinking about it. My favorite place is Goldilocks. I think I have to do a shout out to the, at least by volume, we eat there the most at my family. And we get a dozen bagels, which I put in the freezer and we eat over a couple of weeks, but I love their rosemary sea salt bagel.
[Danielle Balocca]: Just ate one this morning, yeah. So, thanks.
[Kit Collins]: As for me, it's always a hard question. I feel like I have to bounce between my two South Medford faves. Last time I was on the podcast, I had to say Colette, because it's right down the street from my house. But this time of year has me thinking about Oasis, like a perfect summer evening is to stop by the tough school and then go get a nice dinner at Oasis and sit outside. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
[Chelli Keshavan]: I love it. Sounds great. So happy to jump in. We thought we might ask you to start by teaching us about sort of the basics of CCOPS and just giving us sort of the framework and a little bit about the history.
[Jean Zotter]: Sure, so I'll dive in from the community side. CCOP stands for Community Control Over Public Surveillance. And it's basically a legal mechanism for the city to present what surveillance technology they plan to use in the city at a city council hearing and for the public to provide input into whether we think that technology makes sense for our city. how we think the technology should be used, especially on Medford residents. and input into how they'll report or sort of tracking over time how the technology is used. So it doesn't bar any technology. It's really just setting up a public input process to make the use of technology transparent and use the technology accountable to Medford residents. Why this matters is that there is more and more technology created every day. Artificial intelligence is in the news now, but there's other things like just even location data that's on your phone that Google can sell to brokers who then can sell it to police departments. They have these huge pieces of data on you. There's other kinds of technology. such as a stingray which is not used in Medford but is used by other police departments in the state where they mimic cell phone towers and can get your location data on track where you are. So there's a lot of this technology emerging every year. And it's not regulated, really, I think, maybe people hear the most about facial recognition technology. But, and so that is one piece, but there's other types of technology and we have very little state law or federal law that govern it. It's used a lot by police departments, but also by other, like, school departments. Public housing sometimes uses this technology. So we just wanted to set up a transparent process before Medford. Right now in Medford, we don't have a ton of this technology. Maybe the thing that's the closest is the body-worn cameras, although, you know, we do have a lot of surveillance cameras in the city. But We want to be ahead of the game so that if Medford wants to purchase some of this more advanced technology that we're able to have community input into it and understand how it's being used. One thing that comes up a lot that I'll just mention here and then I'll turn it over to Kit is this ordinance doesn't restrict individual uses. This is more of a policy perspective. We just want to know what are we using and how, in a general sense, it will be used. It's not like inserting city council into every police investigation. That's not the point. It's more what are our policies for this and how it will be used.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Great. Thank you.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, thanks, Jean. I think that's a really great and clear overview. And just to add a little bit from the city council perspective and what motivated me to jump onto this ordinance project when I was first approached by Medford People Power at the start of my term. But first, just to color it a bit about that last point that Jean was making about what this ordinance does and doesn't do when we first started meeting on this. Um, you know, I got some questions from residents saying, Hey, like I have a nest camera, you know, because I get Amazon packages dropped off. Will this affect me? And the answer is no. Um, this is community control over public surveillance. It only regulates surveillance technologies or surveillance data that the city uses or owns or purchases. Um, so just to clear that up, cause I know it's. It's a lot of terms that we're not used to using in common parlance to just to draw that distinction. It's, um, public uses of surveillance technology. So as Jean was saying, there's not a ton of surveillance technology that is currently being used in Medford. But this ordinance was still, I think, really important to get on the books now. And I think that we were well positioned to take up the ordinance now, even though it's not like we're flush with all of these new and different and novel surveillance technologies, you know, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that I think in so many cases, we're well served by creating a mechanism for thinking through something as a community before we're inundated by it, before it's become a really big, overwhelming, urgent issue. to say okay like right now Medford has you know one surveillance technology that's explicitly covered by the ordinance it's still important to have a structure and say okay that's great and let's make a structure now for getting city council input into surveillance technology in general and creating a mechanism for community involvement in that process in general so that the next time a surveillance technology is proposed by some city agency. We're not scrambling to make sure that the process for considering it is transparent and is accountable and that the community has a fighting chance to know what's going on. We're setting that up in advance. And I just think for any issue, it's really important to be proactive in that way, especially when you're dealing with things that really are significant. And I think that that is the part that was really one of the many parts that was compelling to me. about an ordinance that provides a structure for regulating surveillance technology is, they're significant and kind of across many categories. The first one, which I think relates most clearly, tracks most clearly to our other responsibilities on the City Council is These technologies are really, really expensive. One of our existing responsibilities as a city council is to sign off on major financial commitments. Money papers come to us, appropriations come to us, we have the yes, no vote on the budget, you know, discretionary spending during the year comes before us and we vote on it. Surveillance technologies are unbelievably expensive. So even on that metric alone, it is consistent with the rest of our abilities to have a voice in the discussion of what is this big investment, you know, whether it's body-worn cameras, which were purchased before this ordinance went into effect, you know, or whatever the next surveillance technology proposed is, is this major expense going to help us, is it going to help us enough that it's worth this amount of money? That, you know, could easily go to any other community need. Is it worth it? And maybe it is, but we have to have a discussion about it, the same as we do with any other major expense. The other thing, you know, that I think undergirds all of this, and the other reason why it's really important to make sure that the conversation about whether and how these come into the community is really important is You know, these technologies can pose real threats to personal privacy, to civil liberties, especially to people in communities of color, marginalized populations. And we haven't, you know, we haven't seen that in Medford yet because we don't have a lot of surveillance technology. But we've seen that in other communities all over the nation. We've seen surveillance technologies lead to wrongful arrests, wrongful convictions. We've seen them exacerbate over-policing of communities of color. These are things that we have that we should be wary of. I think that really shores up the need for a proactive process about saying, you know, no technology is fully benevolent. You know, no community is immune from things that we know to be risky and complicated. You know, it's not like we have public agencies developing and promulgating these technologies. These are privately developed, and they're aggressively marketed to communities, and this ordinance you know, what I think it says is there's nothing special about Medford for why we need CCOPS, but there's also nothing about Medford that makes us immune to the real risks and complexities of surveillance technology. And that's why we wanted to try and pass this ordinance, you know, now and not wait any longer because, you know, we don't have any technology that's going away. We just have more technology coming in.
[Danielle Balocca]: Ed, was there something you wanted to add?
[Jean Zotter]: Well, Kit covered it, but I did want to point out that the Boston Globe did an article about where the technologies that the Boston Police Department are employed. And it was predominantly in low income communities of color. And nationally, that is what we see is surveillance technologies are being used. in most vulnerable neighborhoods, often without any oversight. And the second piece of that is that they're often very bad. Facial recognition is a perfect example of they're very bad at working with people of color and that they don't match well, they often misidentify who is seen in the camera or who's in the photo. So they're overused in those communities, but they're not well created for the communities they're used in. That's all.
[Chelli Keshavan]: So, while you are both speaking I was appreciating the notion of designing a community mechanism of thinking about what our process audit might look like. And I guess to that point I'm wondering if you might speak more more on. Medford People Power as an organization, and then maybe what it would look like for folks to kind of engage with this thought process, you know, in a timeline that makes sense towards, you know, what it means to drive process that can become policy in time. Sure.
[Jean Zotter]: So Medford People Power was started in March of 2017. That was around when Trump was elected and started to do significant anti-immigrant policies. and deputized police departments to report undocumented immigrants or people they believe to be undocumented. So the first thing that Medford People Power did was we worked at the police department. The ACLU had a model policy around non-cooperation with ICE, with the immigration agency. Basically, our belief for that particular one, which we're not talking about now, but that's how we started, was just that it keeps Medford safer when immigrants feel like they can work with the police. And so we succeeded in getting that policy passed. And then the next thing we did was to work on CCOPS. We're a small but mighty group and would love to have more members join us. We meet, our meetings are open. We meet once a month. And I can get you our email so people can sign up and join us. You know, I have a law background and have worked on policy at the city and state level. And I guess. you know, making the, they call it making the sausage, can be kind of messy and you don't always get what you want and it does take time for CCOPS. We worked on this for four years. So some of these policy pieces aren't going to happen overnight, but then you do see results and it feels great. So if people want to get involved, we'd love to have them join us because The big thing about C Cops is it's not going to work if we're not monitoring it. So we need to make sure it's implemented and we need to turn out to those city council hearings when they're presenting their policies.
[Danielle Balocca]: So the ordinance for C Cops, it sounds like the way it would work is if the city was considering a new type of public surveillance, they would have to present this to the city council or like public input before they were able to move forward. Is that right?
[Jean Zotter]: Yes, and I don't know if you want to take this, but Kit can talk about the particulars, but that was the aim, is that any existing, it covered, it was retroactive, it covered existing and new technology, they have to get approval from city council to use. So there's approval to use and then approval of how it will be used.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, exactly. And just to jump in to sort of just put a little bit of concreteness to the ordinance that we passed exactly sort of like the how of that community involvement and city council involvement process is putting aside for a moment the approval of any pre-existing uses. You know, should a new surveillance technology be proposed by any Medford agency, by which I mean like school department, Medford police, any other department says like, hey, I think this would be useful for my department. I would like to use this. They then have to fulfill certain conditions before the city council, which is to put together a document, a use policy, which just says, this is what this is. This is what it's for. This is how much it would cost. And this is why we want to use it. This is how we think it would be useful. That goes before the City Council, we get to discuss it. We're holding public meetings, you know, it's often said the City Council is the public forum. Sometimes that feels more materially true than other times because there's, you know, often not that many people watching in, but this does provide an opportunity to say this is being discussed in public forum. Um, you know, those should be well publicized. This is people's opportunity to listen in, to know what's being proposed, to know what's being discussed. It becomes part of the public record so people can refer back to it and learn about it later on. And then the city council has an opportunity to, you know, read that document, learn, discuss with the, you know, essentially with the proponent, um, why this is being, why this is being sought. Um, and then either vote yes, we approve this use policy for the surveillance technology, or to say no, or to request modifications. We'll say yes if you tweak this use policy, like we think it can be used in this way, but we don't feel good about this way. We feel good about this scope, but we're hearing concerns from the residents about this aspect, so it's an opportunity for some revision. like we do in a lot of other areas, such as, you know, on ordinances or on the city budget. And that's the process for kind of putting it before the city council, before the surveillance technology is approved. And that's the mechanism for essentially, you know, inviting the community into that process via the city council. And then there is also some, you know, some follow up on the back end for sort of continuing trying to bring the use of these technologies to light and put them on the record. Every surveillance technology, for every surveillance technology, there has to be an annual report filed once a year, which essentially says, essentially the goal of that document is to say, here's how we said we would be using this technology. Here's how we said we think it would be useful. Here's how it matches up. How was it used? Where was it used? What was it used for? And that goes to the city council so that we can, just in a very routinized way, be saying, does this make sense? Are the use of these technologies, what they're being used for, how they're helping, is it matching up to the purpose that they were purchased for? And if there's a discrepancy, then we can investigate that and bring that to light. Because with anything else, if you buy, let me try to see if I can put together a really concrete example here. you know, if you buy a hammer, and then, you know, all the ways you're, you know, you're mounting frames on your hall is with like, you know, with screws, you're like, well, since we should do something about this hammer that we're not using, you know, you want the tool to fit the actual need, you want it to be useful. Again, both because these are, you know, risky technologies, we're talking about people's personal data, and because they're really expensive. So this is just our way of holding the city accountable to using very intense technologies responsibly.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And so it sounds like if the city were to propose a new technology, we'd hear about it in city council. How would like community members know to like, how could they hear about like, when this is happening, when to show up and like, you know, hear about the proposal and voice their opinions?
[Jean Zotter]: They could get on our Medford People Power email list. So we have an email list and we you know, if you want to get involved, but don't feel like you can commit to meetings, you can get on our email list and we'll alert you. It will be posted on the City Council agenda, so those of us that read the City Council agendas closely, you would see that. We partnered with eight community groups across the city on this, so we would reach out to them to get them involved. NAACP, Mystic Valley, Safe Medford, some church groups, the Democratic City Committee also supported this. So we reach out to the community organizations to let them know also. And I have our email, which is medford.people.power at gmail.com. So if anyone wants to get involved, they could just email us.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Thank you. So I feel like while listening to both of you speak in different ways, you both kind of touched on the intersectionality of where CCOPS could be heading. I feel like I heard you mention the relationship between law and surveillance and sort of race-based indicators, health-based indicators. I wondered if you might just forecast for us kind of your sense of the breadth of where this could be headed and why it's so important to build the mechanism now?
[Jean Zotter]: Well, I mentioned earlier that making the sausage is sometimes ugly. It's like the messy process. So this isn't a perfect ordinance in the process of negotiating with the mayor and the police department. And I do wanna say that the mayor was supportive of the overall concept of C-COPs, but there were some changes made to the ordinance that we would like to fix. One of them is that there's a section on, you know, data, sort of the, we talked about like location data or those protected pieces of data which right now are not very well regulated. As far as Google can take all the phones, location data, sell it to a broker, and then there was just an article in the Globe, San Francisco Police Department purchases all of this bulk data. I don't want to get too complicated, but if they buy different sources of bulk data, they can actually start to identify people and figure out where they've been. That's not regulated at all. So that was excluded in this, the final moments of developing the ordinance. So the police department under this ordinance can purchase that data without going in front of city council. And that was a last minute edit by the city. And so we would like to change that and make any bull purchasing of privacy data, of data we would say is privacy, privacy protected data that would have to go through city council. Does that make sense? I don't know if I explained it.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, I think I'm just putting my head to maybe like a cultural onboarding of the notion of big data and the power that it yields without regulation, maybe.
[Jean Zotter]: Right. The other piece and then I'll kick it into the details of some of this, but the only way the city would agree to this is if we excluded body worn cameras for, I think it's five years, so they will eventually come under this ordinance but right now they're excluded. And so just monitoring how body worn cameras go, whether they're actually you know the the stated purpose of for the city to get them is for accountability, you know, for the police to be accountable to the public. And so we just want to make sure that how they're used instead of as a surveillance tool, which has happened in other communities where it's used more as evidence in criminal cases and as a tool to surveil the public.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, thanks, Jean. I think that you, I think that you put all that really well. And those are a lot of, I think, really important notes for people to know about kind of what to expect in the short term from the ordinance and how it got here. You know, I think, especially reflecting on what you just shared, I think like one of the themes of this of this project and other projects like it is trust but verify. As we were working through this ordinance over the past year and a half in committee, something that I was trying to make very clear to my colleagues and other people that we were working with was this isn't being proposed because of the people in power right now at all. this is not because of any particular administration, it's not because of any particular staff member, you know, who's leading what, that is, you know, that is not the point. We're going to see, you know, in terms of where do we go from here, you know, thinking even beyond the next five years, we don't know where we're going from here. We don't know who's going to be in charge of what in 10 years or 25 years, and we don't know what technologies are going to be developed and produced and marketed to Medford in 10 years or 25 years or 50 years. We just know that it's still going to be an issue. Surveillance technology is not going away. I think that we would be doing a disservice to our residents if we say, well, it'll be probably fine. I'm sure that nothing will come across our desks that would be that bad, so not a big deal. It is a big deal. By being proactive, we make sure that we gives ourselves the chance to catch things before they become a big harmful deal. So, you know, we know that in five years, body-worn cameras will become subject to all of the requirements of the ordinance, you know, not just the annual recording. And I think until then, you know, it's just a great way for constituents to remain engaged. And, you know, residents and city council members alike to try to remain engaged and stay in touch and try to be learning as much as we can about the use policies that are promulgated in the short term to see if any edits need to be made when they do become subject to the ordinance in five years, same as we would for any other technology. and to make sure, as Jean mentioned, that we are continuing to monitor this ordinance and monitor its implementation and enforcement. Every ordinance can be a living document to say, let's see how this is working. Let's see if this is doing what we need it to do because the surveillance technology is going away. So if there's a way to make this stronger and more protective, then we should do that.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you.
[Chelli Keshavan]: So 50 years into the future, I think, Kit, while you were talking, I'm wondering about whether there's sort of a CCOPS-based youth energy. And I think my head is specifically going to app-based data and, you know, the extent to which we kind of all maybe use apps, but maybe young folks in particular. And there's a lot there that can be weaponized in different spaces. So if you have any thoughts, or Jean, if you have thoughts, thank you.
[Kit Collins]: You can go ahead, Kit. Okay, sure. I think that, yeah, I mean, I think the question overall makes me think of, you know, kind of how hard it is to know what's coming down the pike in the future. And certainly, like, there's a million branches to be like thinking and speculating about, you know, and you mentioned apps. I mean, I know there was a very large and ongoing national conversation about data privacy and security related to TikTok on the national scale in terms of national level security concern, which is just one illustrative example of how any seemingly innocuous thing can have this underbelly where it's something that we really have to be thinking about in terms of privacy and security at the personal, local, state, national level. you know, that very quickly gets outside of the jurisdiction of what me and my city council colleagues have the ability to, you know, write policy about. But I think it shores up the point that, you know, this issue is going to be advancing on all levels. And I think that was a big part of the motivation for me to spend so much of my first term working on this ordinance, because we were so lacking in regulation. As Jean mentioned earlier, at the federal and state levels, we have to do all that we can. At the local level, we should be using all the tools in the tool box so that there are these big gaps in regulation at every level, but the ones that we can affect, we should be doing that. I just had a follow-up to that, but I lost my train of thought. I'll come back to it.
[Jean Zotter]: No problem. If I could jump in and just I mean I think it's all it's an issue now there is a state. bill the ACLU is promoting called the Location Shield Act, which would shield from government location data. And the reason this is important is you see it being used right now in states that have outlawed abortion. They're using it to track people who either go in state or out of state to seek an abortion. And so it's, Those at that app based data location data is being used in some states now and there is this bill is called Location Shield Act. The ACLU is promoting to protect that data in Massachusetts.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I like the overlap with like. of like equity in sort of this type of regulation, right, where you're saying like we have these technologies, we're not exactly sure how they'll operate, but we are sort of sure that they will affect different people differently. And I think it sounds like this ordinance helps us to be sort of like responsive to these issues rather than reactive. So we have a plan in place for like what happens when these sort of come to the city and how we kind of want to respond to them. Kit, did you have something you wanted to add?
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, thank you. I think that's just, I think that if there's one thing that I want to leave people with, it's sort of, you know, for folks who like aren't, who don't go into this conversation familiar with surveillance technology and knowing, you know, why it's something to, you know, be kind of reasonably wary about and be building a process around. It's exactly the point that you just made, Danielle. You know, and again, to kind of try and search for metaphors as I like to do, I think it's very hard for humans in general to conceptualize threats that are already occurring. We see this in climate change, but as a more recent example, when the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, we weren't repaired. We didn't have the stockpile of the things that we would have needed at the time because we didn't know that we would need them. We were able to belatedly build up those stocks of ventilators and N95s, and now we're trying to make our health system more resilient to future shocks. But we weren't ready when it happened. Of course, you can't be ready for every unpredictable thing. But in this case, we can reasonably predict that this is something that we need to have a catching mechanism for. because of the trajectory that the proliferation of surveillance technologies are already around. And I think this is true of sort of any technological arc, but it's especially true, you know, it's as true of surveillance technology, and it's very impactful for individual people and, you know, societies of any size, which is that, you know, the pace of evolution for privately developed technologies is going to far, far, far outstrip the pace of any level of government to regulate them. This is why we've had the ability to implement facial recognition technology in cities and states for years, and our governments are still trying to hash out these facial recognition regulations on the state level. We're always going to be behind. So we have to really swim against that tide and say, no, we're being proactive. This is not naive. It would be naive to think that this is not going to be an issue that we have to prepare ourselves for as best as we can.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. Well, thank you. This has been a really comprehensive view of CCOPS and all of its impacts. I wonder if there's anything else that either of you want to mention before we wrap up.
[Jean Zotter]: I just want to put the plug in that we love to have more people join us with Medford People Power. We're a great group. We support each other, and it's just a really fun group. So again, if you want to join us, it's medford.people.power at gmail.com. And you can either just get on our email list or join us at meetings. So we'd love to see you.
[Kit Collins]: Great. Thank you. And I will corroborate that Medford People Power is great. I am so grateful to them for working with me on this ordinance. Over the past year and a half, they put in a lot of many, many months of hard work on it before I was ever elected. And I'm really glad to be able to work with them on privacy and civil liberties in Medford.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. Well, thank you both.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah, thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Irenys. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites. Never Bites. Good job.
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