Testimony on Behalf of COS-D.C. To The D.C. Council Committee on The Judiciary and Public Safety

OTI and COS-DC coalition partners submitted testimony to the DC Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety at the October 15, 2020 hearing on police reform legislation and protester protections. The coalition urged the DC Council to consider surveillance reform along with police reform legislation, recommending oversight legislation that would provide opportunities for community input and oversight into the technologies that the Metropolitan Police Department and other District agencies acquire and use. The testimony specifically highlighted how surveillance technologies can impede DC residents' First Amendment rights and drive the discriminatory policing that led to the need for this hearing and police reform legislation.

Many of these powerful surveillance technologies are extremely privacy invasive, as they provide the government an unprecedented ability to monitor local residents over time, and accumulate vast amounts of personal data (especially when combined). Accordingly, it is critical that residents and local elected officials are able to provide input into whether, and how, any surveillance technology is used in their jurisdiction. For example, numerous studies have established that technologies like facial recognition are biased against women and people of color, and we now have clear examples of cases in which facial recognition mismatches led to the wrongful arrests of Black men. Surveillance technologies are also often disproportionately used on communities of color, leading to higher arrest rates in those communities and potentially feeding this cycle of police brutality and racialized policing.